The Man Booker International Prize 2007

Chinua Achebe becomes the Man Booker International's second winner

The judges

Elaine Showalter (chair)
Dr. Elaine Showalter is Professor Emeritus of English and Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the University of California at Davis, she is the author or editor of eighteen books. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards and the National Magazine Fiction Awards in the U.S., and the Orange Prize in the U.K. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.
Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, in South Africa in 1923. She was educated at a convent school and spent a year at Witwaterstrand University. Since then, her life has been devoted to her writing. Her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), was based largely on her own life and set in her home town. In 1974, her novel The Conservationist, was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction. Nadine Gordimer has been awarded fifteen honorary degrees from universities in USA, Belgium, South Africa, and from York, Oxford and Cambridge Universities. She was made a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and was judge of the Man Booker International Prize in 2007. She was also a founder of the Congress of South African Writers. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 2007, the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.
Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford in 1955 and educated at University College Dublin. He is the author of five novels: The South, (1990) winner of The Irish Times Literature Prize in 1991; The Heather Blazing, winner of the Encore Award for the best second novel in 1992; The Story of the Night (1997); The Blackwater Lightship (1999), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and The Master (2004), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France. Tóibín’s books have been translated into twenty-five languages.