People's Choice

The new Man Booker International prize for fiction allows anyone to vote. Your vote doesn't count, but you are allowed to nominate and enter a public comments about authors. The prize of £60,000 can be won only once by an author. Many other aspects of this new prize are creating buzz (see the recent Guardian article). One interesting note is that although the winning author can be of any nationality, the book must be available in English. It's my understanding that this leaves out most of the world's annual output of literature. Comment triste. Maybe the French have hold of something important in their agony over GooglePrint. Another buzzable is the fact that the three-person panel of judges includes a woman, Iranian Dr. Azar Nafisi, who wrote about her expulsion in 1981 from teaching at the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil in Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.