The announcement of the Man Booker Prize shortlist and the subsequent uproar has left me not quite certain about for whom I should feel more sorry—the slighted authors that everyone expected to make the list, or the authors who made the list who are now described largely as being ‘unknowns,’ ‘unexpected,’ ‘contentious,’ and so on. I can imagine them clipping out the articles (or printing them out, in this our modern age) with a hint of a sigh.

Nevertheless, the projected winners of the Prize are now out of contention. David Mitchell was the favourite, for his novel Black Swan Green, followed by Peter Carey, Booker-Prize winner in 1988 and 2001, for Theft: A Love Story. Nadine Gordimer and Barry Unsworth were also longlisted authors who had previously won the Prize. Waterstone’s also pointed out that Mitchell “would face stiff competition from Sarah Waters and Andrew O’Hagan,” according to BBC News.

Of all of these favourites, only Waters remains, and she has consequently been crowned Most Likely to Win. Her novel, The Night Watch, about love and loss during WWII, is joined by five other books on the shortlist: Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, an epic that traverses the author’s native India and New York; Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, about an Australian penal colony in the nineteenth century; M.J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down, a story about the troubled childhood of an unsual Irish boy; Hisham Matar’s semi-autobiographical In the Country of Men, and Mother’s Milk, Edward St. Aubyn’s depiction of an affluent and dysfunctional family.

The Independent points out via the time-honoured horserace metaphor that the gallop to the Booker generally involves both well-known favourites and unknowns, and that in this regard the inclusion of ’surprising’ authors is a downright Man Booker tradition. On the other hand, the percentages are far greater this year, and half of the shortlisted authors are relative newcomers to the field: both Kiran Desai and M.J. Hyland published only one novel prior to the one currently on the list, and Hisham Matar was nominated for his very first book. The majority of female writers is also a rarity, and this is the first time that two Australian authors have made the shortlist.

Hermione Lee, famous literary critic and chair of this year’s judging panel, explained the shortlist decision: “Each of these novels has what we as judges were most looking for: a distinctive, original voice and audacious imagination that takes readers to undiscovered countries of the mind, a strong power of storytelling and a historical truthfulness.”

But Lee’s search for “audacious imagination” will not consitute the sole deciding factor, as it was recently announced that the Man Booker organisers have selected six book clubs around England to participate in the judging process. (Or, in the words of The Enquirer, they chose “to pluck six remarkable groups from relative obscurity to join their distinguished panel,” thus corroborating the Remarkable Things Plucked from Relative Obscurity theme beloved by either the Man Booker panel, the press, or both.) Groups similar to the Heaton Library Book Club, comprised of 23 women, will read the six shortlisted novels and catalogue their thoughts in journals and diaries, before voting on the group’s preferred winner and sending their results on to the national panel in London.

The Man Booker Prize has been open to writers from Britain, Ireland, and the Commonwealth of former colonies since its inception in 1969. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on 10 October, and will receive a £50,000 award.

Thanks to Rebecca Swain Vadnie of the Orlando Sentinal, through whom we discovered one of these links; visit her blog post about it here.