Having just gotten back to the office after a week away I'm catching up on my news, so my apologies if this is old hat for you.
When the Booker Prize long list was announced the other week the usual guessing on who would win started to take place. The bookmakers all posted their odds and the punters began dropping their bets like usual. However, as the Telegraph reported last week, betting patterns have been anything but ordinary with 95% of all bets being placed on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.
"It's almost like an unspoken
psychic rumour has gone round that this will be Hilary Mantel's year," spokesman
Graham Sharpe said, as the odds were cut from 12/1 to make it the clear 2/1
favourite.
"We'll lose a five figure sum if
the support continues. It is as though a tip has gone around the literary world
telling everyone that Mantel is a certainty.
In the last couple years the odds on favorite has not won, however there has not been this level of interest in Booker Betting since 2002 when Yan Martel's Life of Pi was bet on as if it were a shoe in.
"Quite a lot of them (people
placing the bets) are what we would describe as literary insiders," he said.
"Nobody quite seems to know why."
But he ruled out the notion of any
foul play, saying: "It would be unusual for the judges to know who they were
picking as the eventual winner already. I would be very, very surprised if the
judges had already decided.
"It's not in the realms of crying
foul or anything like that, it may be just a case of a lot of people deciding on
the same one at the same time."
He added it was "very, very rare to
see this type of gamble" and said it was "definitely the biggest Booker gamble
since Life of Pi was backed as though defeat was out of the question a few years
ago".
William Hill's latest 2009 Man
Booker Prize for Fiction odds are:
:: 2/1 Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall;
:: 4/1 Colm Toibin - Brooklyn;
:: 4/1 Sarah Waters - The Little
Stranger;
:: 6/1 JM Coetzee - Summertime;
:: 6/1 James Lever - Me Cheeta;
:: 10/1 AS Byatt - The Children's
Book;
:: 12/1 William Trevor - Love and
Summer;
:: 14/1 Ed O'Loughlin - Not Untrue
& Not Unkind;
:: 14/1 Simon Mawer - The Glass
Room;
:: 16/1 Adam Foulds - The
Quickening Maze,
:: 16/1 Sarah Hall - How to Paint a
Dead Man,
:: 16/1 Samantha Harvey - The
Wilderness;
:: 16/1 James Scudamore -
Heliopolis.
I'm not a betting man but if I were I would put my money down on AS Byatt, I think she's the dark horse in this race (it should be known I have failed to call every booker I have atempted). How about the rest of you Journal readers, who do you think will win this years Booker?