2012 Man Booker Prize

The 2012 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 16 October 2012. A longlist of twelve titles was announced on 25 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 11 September. The jury was chaired by Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, accompanied by literary critics Dinah Birch and Bharat Tandon, historian and biographer Amanda Foreman, and Dan Stevens, actor of Downton Abbey fame with a background English Literature studies. The jury was faced with the controversy of the 2011 jury, whose approach had been seen as overly populist. Whether or not as a response to this, the 2012 jury strongly emphasised the value of literary quality and linguistic innovation as criteria for inclusion.

The winner was Hilary Mantel, an early favourite, for her book Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to her novel Wolf Hall, which won the award in 2009. Mantel became the first woman, and the first Briton, to win the prize twice. A strong challenger to Mantel was established writer Will Self, who was nominated for the first time. Other shortlisters included second-time nominee Tan Twan Eng, Deborah Levy, who returned from a long hiatus of publishing, and novelist débutantes Alison Moore and Jeet Thayil. In the days and weeks leading up to the announcement of the winner, both media commentators and bookmakers considered Mantel and Self favourites to win, with the other four nominees ranked as outsiders.

The 2011 Man Booker Prize attracted a great deal of negative press. The jury's chair, General Director of the MI5 turned spy fiction writer Dame Stella Rimington, was criticised for her statement that what the jury was looking for in the winner was "readability". Likewise, jury member Chris Mullin, a former Labour MP, stated that he liked a novel to "zip along". Critics alleged that literary quality was ignored, and Robert McCrum of The Observer declared the nominations "one of the worst-ever shortlists". Rimington responded to the criticism by claiming that "[p]eople weirder than me have chaired the Booker." Alex Clark, also of The Observer, called the controversy a "straw man debate", contending that the shortlisted writers were "no more – and no less — "readable" than many other writers." Even McCrum had to admit that the winner, Julian Barnes for his The Sense of an Ending, was worthy of the prize.

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