El Booker y las ventas
9.25.2007
Ya apareció la shortlist del Booker y, desde luego, el multi favorito Ian McEwan y On Chesil Beach sigue ahí. Eso no es sorprendente. Lo que sí ha sorprendido a muchos es que, fuera de McEwan, quien ya superó las 100,000 copias de su libro, las ventas de los demás de la lista son paupérrimas, al nivel de best seller peruano digamos. ¿Crisis del mundo editorial? ¿Ya nadie compra ficciones en el mundo? ¿Ha dejado de tener interés para los lectores el Booker? Las cifras son elocuentes. La nota es de Nigel Reynolds en Telegraph.co.uk
Dice Reynolds: "While McEwan's novella, On Chesil Beach, has been a runaway commercial success, selling more than 100,000 copies, one of his rivals for the prize, Animal's People, loosely based on the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, by the Indian author Indra Sinha, had sold just 231 copies in this country by mid-August, 10 days after its sales were supposedly given a major boost by being longlisted. Nicola Barker's Darkmans had sold only 499 copies. Anne Enright's The Gathering had fared a little better with sales of 834 sales, Mister Pip had sales of 880 and of McEwan's rivals, only Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist broke the four-figure barrier, with 1,519 readers buying it (...) The Man Booker organisers denied that readers' apparent indifference demonstrated dwindling interest in the prize, first launched in 1969. Ion Trewin, the administrator, defended the selection of barely known authors and forecast that sales would pick quickly once the shortlist was known. He said: "One of the joys of this prize is identifying talent for the future. "It is a strong list and if we had six well-known names every year we would be criticised for not encouraging new talent. And just because you are a well-known name, it does not mean that you produce your best work every year." Four winners in the past 10 years - Yann Martel, DBC Pierre, Kiran Desai and Arundhati Roy - were unkown before their victories, he said.
La shortlist incluye a las siguientes novelas:
Darkmans, by Nicola Barker
On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan
Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones
Animal's People, by Indra Sinha
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid
The Gathering, by Anne Enright Liam.
Etiquetas: barker, booker, hamid, ian mc ewan, jones, liam, PREMIO, sinha
