British novelist Andrew Miller and Indian author Kiran Desai are the bookmakers’ favourites to claim the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction, with the winner set to be announced at a ceremony in London on Monday.
The two authors are among six finalists vying for the coveted literary award, which not only bestows a £50,000 prize but also provides a significant boost to the recipient’s sales and public profile. This year’s victor, chosen from a pool of 153 submitted novels, will be selected by a judging panel that includes Irish writer Roddy Doyle and actor Sarah Jessica Parker.
UK bookmaker William Hill has placed Miller, 64, at 15-8 odds to win for The Land in Winter. His novel is a tale of love and secrets, centred on two couples in rural England during the exceptionally cold winter of 1962-63. Miller was previously a Booker finalist in 2001 for his work Oxygen.
Desai, 54, is a close second with 2-1 odds for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, marking her first novel in two decades.
This almost 700-page narrative follows two young Indians as they navigate life in the United States around the turn of the millennium. It is Desai’s third novel and her first since The Inheritance of Loss, which secured her the Booker Prize in 2006.
Should she win, Desai would become only the fifth author to achieve a double Booker victory, joining the ranks of J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, and Hilary Mantel. Online bookmaker Betway also lists Miller as the frontrunner, followed by Desai.
Hungarian-British writer David Szalay’s Flesh, which charts one man’s life across decades with unadorned naturalism, has also attracted considerable betting interest in the days leading up to the ceremony.
The remaining contenders on the shortlist are Susan Choi’s intricate family saga Flashlight, Katie Kitamura’s exploration of acting and identity in Audition, and Ben Markovits’ midlife-crisis road trip, The Rest of Our Lives.
Roddy Doyle, a Booker winner himself in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, has noted that all six shortlisted books tackle significant issues, including migration and class, in a "brilliantly human" way.
Established in 1969, the Booker Prize has built a formidable reputation for transforming writers’ careers. Its distinguished list of past winners includes Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, and Samantha Harvey, who took the 2024 prize for her space station story Orbital.
Initially open to English-language novels from the UK, Ireland, and the Commonwealth, the prize expanded its eligibility in 2014 to include American writers. While concerns about an "American takeover" were voiced at the time, these have largely proven unfounded, despite this year’s shortlist featuring three US writers – Choi, Kitamura, and Markovits – and Desai, who has long resided in New York.
