Genre: "a flimsy irrelevence"

From: Retronaut

"This week, the chair of this year's Man Booker prize, Robert Macfarlane, published an introduction to a new edition of M John Harrison's Climbers. In it, he says 'let me try to express a little of the amazement I feel when standing in front of the work of Harrison, who is best known as one of the restless fathers of modern SF but who is to my mind among the most brilliant novelists writing today, and with regard to whom the question of genre is a flimsy irrelevance.' Are we witnessing the end of the genre wars? Macfarlane has written introductions as enthusiastically to the (genre) work of John Christopher and the (literary) work Edward Thomas and Charles Dickens. Before starting on this year's submissions for the Man Booker (I am also a judge), I was among those who selected the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, a list which featured a number of genre-inflected writers (Steven Hall, Naomi Alderman, Joanna Kavenna, Ned Beauman, Xiaolu Guo, Helen Oyeyemi, Jenni Fagan and Sarah Hall). Is genre, as Macfarlane says 'a flimsy irrelevance?'"

— The Guardian Book Blog
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What are the odds?

"On Tuesday night, Hilary Mantel became the first woman to win the Man Booker prize twice, as well as the first British author, for her novel Bring Up The Bodies. Such a feat sees her join Peter Carey and J. M. Coetzee, mirroring the ratio of one female prizewinner to two male throughout the prize's 43 year history.
     While she's 'astonished' at her success, Mantel is more than aware of the significance of this. She says, 'I do think there has been a difficulty for women to get their fiction taken as seriously as men’s fiction, although I think things are beginning to equalize.'
     'But it’s not a perfect world. If you look at what is reviewed, by whom it is reviewed, on the major websites, in the broadsheets, it does seem that there are many more male writers out there than there are women writers. Which is not the case.'"
— Alice E. Vincent, The Huffington Post
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You can get Hilary Mantel's books — and books by all the other short-listed Man Booker 2012 contenders — here...

Man Booker Shortlist Unveiled

"Orwell’s second best-selling novel behind 1984
was rejected four times before going on to sell
20 million copies." — Flavorwire

"Novelists who struggled long and hard just to get their books into the shops after a string of rejections by big publishers have joined the more established literary names of Hilary Mantel and Will Self on a Man Booker shortlist which this year celebrates 'the power and depth of prose.' The six books in contention for the £50,000 prize came from what the chair of judges, Peter Stothard, called 'an exhilarating year for fiction – the strongest, I would say, for more than a decade.'"
— Mark Brown and Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"The six books were chosen by a panel of judges chaired by Sir Peter Stothard, Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. The shortlisted books were selected from the longlist of 12 announced in July.
     The shortlist is: [...]
     Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books); Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories/Faber & Faber); Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate); Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt); Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury); Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber).
     Peter Stothard, Chair of judges, comments: 'After re-reading an extraordinary longlist of twelve, it was the pure power of prose that settled most debates. We loved the shock of language shown in so many different ways and were exhilarated by the vigour and vividly defined values in the six books that we chose – and in the visible confidence of the novel's place in forming our words and ideas.'”
— The Man Booker Prizes
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Buy all of the Man Booker nominees here...