Man Booker Prize: 6 nominees on the shortlist

Each year, the high-profile Man Booker Prize is awarded to a novel written by an author who is a citizen of Ireland, Zimbabwe, or the Commonwealth of Nations, a group that includes the U.K., Australia, India, and South Africa. The winner receives a cash prize of £50,000 and a significant boost in prestige. Last year, writer Julian Barnes snagged the prize for his book "The Sense of an Ending," and the subsequent bump in visibility has kept the novel in the public eye ever since. Now the shortlist for the 2012 prize has been announced. Which one of the following authors – including 2009 Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel – will have his or her  name called when this year's winner is announced in London on Oct. 16?

1. 'Bring Up the Bodies,' by Hilary Mantel

Mantel has won the Man Booker Prize before, taking it in 2009 for "Wolf Hall," the novel that comes before "Bring Up the Bodies" in Mantel's Tudor series. "Bring Up the Bodies" continues to follow Thomas Cromwell during the reign of Anne Boleyn as Henry VIII grows disenchanted with his second queen and Anne goes to stand trial.

1 of 6

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.