Patrick deWitt on Booker Shortlist!

Canadian-born-but-Portland-based author Patrick deWitt has made it through to the shortlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for fiction for his novel The Sisters Brothers! The other five authors/books on the shortlist announced today are Julian Barnes for The Sense of an Ending, Carol Birth for Jamrach's Menagerie, Esi Edugyan for Half Blood Blues, Stephen Kelman for Pigeon English, and A.D. Miller for Snowdrops.

Barnes is the oddsmakers' favorite to win this year, but that doesn't always pan out. He has been shortlisted for the Booker three times. Birch has made the longlist once before. The others are first-time nominees, and Kelman and Miller are debut novelists. We wrote about the full longlist in a previous blog post last month. The prize aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The winner, who receives the equivalent of about $80,000, will be announced on October 18th. Last year's winner was Howard Jacobson for The Finkler Question.

DeWitt was also honored this week by being one of seventeen writers selected to the 2011 longlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Scotiabank Giller Prize is Canada’s most distinguished literary prize, awarding $50,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English. Finalists on the shortlist receive $5,000. The award was established in 1994 by Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch in honor of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller. In September 2005, Scotiabank was proud to become the first ever co-sponsor of the prize, and it has been known as the Scotiabank Giller Prize ever since.

This year -- the eighteenth year of the prize -- the longlist was selected from 143 books submitted for consideration, a record-setting number of submissions. The shortlist for the Giller will be announced on October 4th, with the winner announced in a ceremony in Toronto on November 8th. Booker shortlister Esi Edugyan also made the longlist for the Giller, along with Alexi Zenter for Touch (gorgeous cover!), Wayne Johnston for A World Elsewhere, Michael Ondaatje for The Cat's Table (publishing in the US next month), Vancouver author Michael Christie for his debut short story collection The Begger's Garden, and Marina Endicott for The Little Shadows. You can read the full long list at the Giller Prize website.