Nearly all the favourites to win this year's £50,000 Man Booker Prize have fallen at the penultimate fence after the judges chose one of the youngest and most eclectic shortlists in years.
In a move that has saved bookmakers a fortune, writers including two-time Booker winner Peter Carey, the highly-acclaimed Andrew O'Hagan and David Mitchell, who was the hottest favourite in the entire history of the prize the last time he was in the running, were all excluded from the final list of six.
Sarah Waters with The Night Watch remains the biggest name in contention and was immediately installed as favourite to take the prestigious prize at the ceremony on 10 October. She has been shortlisted before, for Fingersmith in 2002.
Hermione Lee, the chair of a judging panel which includes Fiona Shaw, the actress, and Anthony Quinn, a critic with The Independent, said Carey, O'Hagan and Mitchell would all survive and thrive without the Booker. "I feel they're such talented and exceptional writers that they don't need us," she said.
Instead, Ms Lee, who was a judge when Salman Rushdie was catapulted to fame with the victory of Midnight's Children in 1981, presented a list which will take many readers by surprise.
The shortlist includes one debut novelist, Hisham Matar with In the Country of Men, Kate Grenville, a former Orange Prize-winner, and Kiran Desai, who is the daughter of the author Anita Desai , herself a three-times Booker nominee.
Canongate, the independent Scottish publisher which triumphed in 2002 with The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, has two titles on the list, Grenville's The Secret River and Carry Me Down by M.J.Hyland.
The final contender is Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn, a 46-year-old author who turned to writing after surviving abuse by his father and heroin addiction.
Several subjects recurred, including the world as viewed through the eyes of children, life in exile and anti-Americanism.
Ms Lee said: "We've come across a lot of anti-Americanism of various kinds in the writing. [Mother's Milk] was probably the most outrageous satire of American culture you can imagine."
The selection surprised commentators. John Sutherland, last year's chairman and author of How to Read a Novel, said it was a "bizarre" list that might signal a changing of the literary guard. "If you compare it with last year, the average age is five or 10 years younger. What we may be seeing is a turning of the tide, the older generation giving way to the new."
Kate Gunning of Foyles said the contest would be one of the most fascinating in years. "It's a huge bonus to have less well known authors on the shortlist."
Rodney Troubridge of Waterstone's said they were surprised and disappointed at the omission of David Mitchell's Black Swan Green but would be delighted if this was to be Sarah Waters' year instead. "We are particularly excited to see Hisham Matar on the list for his brilliant first novel - a child's eye view of a country without liberty."
Matar himself seemed astonished. "I'm almost numb with joy. It's quite marvellous. Writing happens in silence. When something happens like this, it's delightful. It's almost a bodily pleasure."
The contenders
'The Inheritance of Loss' by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton)
The life of an embittered old judge in the north-eastern Himalayas is turned upside down by the arrival of his orphaned grand-daughter Sai. Their stories are woven together with the parallel narrative of the son of the judge's cook, who lives in the shadowy world of illegal immigrants in New York.
Desai, 35, was born in India, the daughter of the author Anita Desai who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Educated in India, England and the United States, she is a student on Columbia University's creative writing course.
William Hill odds 7/1
Ladbrokes odds 4/1
'The Secret River' by Kate Grenville (Canongate)
Thames waterman William Thornhill has a tough, but bearable, life until he makes a mistake for which he is made to pay dearly. He is sentenced to be transported to the colony of New South Wales, Australia, where he sets up home on 100 acres of land but is shocked to find aboriginal people are already living on part of it.
Kate Grenville, 55, was born in Sydney, Australia, and has worked as a film editor, journalist, typist and teacher. Her novels include The Idea of Perfection, which won the 2001 Orange Prize for fiction.
William Hill odds 4/1
Ladbrokes odds 11/2
Carry Me Down by MJ Hyland (Canongate)
John Egan, a young boy, has the unusual talent of knowing when people are lying. He hopes that one day this gift will bring him fame, but in the meantime is forced to deal with the destructive undercurrents of his family. However, his obsession with uncovering the truth becomes a violent and frightening fixation.
MJ Hyland was born in London to Irish parents, spent her early childhood in Dublin before the family moved to Australia. After training and working as a lawyer, her first novel was published in 2004. She lives and works in Manchester.
William Hill odds 5/1
Ladbrokes odds 9/1
'In the Country of Men' by Hisham Matar (Viking)
A young boy growing up in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, in 1979 witnesses a terrifying and bewildering world of secrets and lies. A mysterious man sits outside his house all day and asks questions, while his father has apparently disappeared.
This is the first novel by Hisham Matar, 35, who was born in New York, but spent his childhood in Libya and Egypt before moving to Britain in 1986 where he became an apprentice architect. Matar is the son of a Libyan dissident who has not been heard of since he was imprisoned in Tripoli in 1990.
William Hill odds 6/1
Ladbrokes odds 4/1
'Mother's Milk' by Edward St Aubyn (Picador)
The funny, if degenerate, exploits of Patrick Melrose, a man struggling to measure up to adulthood, and his aristocratic family. A follow-up to St Aubyn's previous trilogy about the once-illustrious Melrose family, although can be read alone.
St Aubyn was born in 1960 in a part of Cornwall where his family had lived since the Norman Conquest. He was raped by his father as a child and further abused, became a heroin addict at 16 and continued the habit through Oxford University. At 28 he considered suicide but turned to therapy instead, talked through his life and used the material to become a writer.
William Hill odds 3/1
Ladbrokes odds 7/1
'The Night Watch' by Sarah Waters (Virago)
The story of four Londoners - three women and a young man - and their interweaving stories during the Second World War. Kate is an ambulance driver, while Helen harbours a painful secret and Viv, a glamour girl, is stubbornly loyal to her brother Duncan, an apparent innocent.
Sarah Waters, 40, was born in Pembrokeshire and went to Cambridge University. Her first book, Tipping the Velvet, the Victorian lesbian novel, was adapted into a three-part television serial, its successor, Fingersmith, was shortlisted for the Booker and Orange prizes. It was also serialised on TV. Waters lives in London.
William Hill odds 2/1 Favourite
Ladbrokes odds 6/4 Favourite
16 September 2006 12:02
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Some people are haunted by the moment John F Kennedy was shot in Dallas in 1963. Others remember the shock of John Lennon's 1980 killing in New York. For the hip-hop generation, though, there is only one iconic figure, Tupac Shakur, and one iconic moment, when he was gunned down in Las Vegas at the height of his notoriety and commercial success 10 years ago.
Violence, mythology and an extraordinary power to touch other people's lives followed Tupac throughout his remarkable, and remarkably turbulent, short career in the first half of the 1990s. He was the embodiment of black rebellion against a hostile consumer society, one of the figureheads of the gangsta rap movement, a poet, an artist, an actor, a political agitator and a hellraiser like no other. Given his history of gun violence and bitter rivalries within the hip-hop industry, the most striking thing about him may not be that he was cut down at the age of 25, but rather that he managed to live as long as he did.
Chuck D, the leader of Public Enemy, once said he would go down as the James Dean of his generation. The Texas rap artist Money Waters compared him this week to Marvin Gaye. Others like to make even more lavish comparisons - part and parcel, perhaps of the hype that goes with the territory of macho urban music these days. "To me," Money Waters' fellow Texan Pikhasso said, "Tupac was a wise but misguided soul who was caught between good and evil, like many of our hip-hop brethren ... when he died, it was as if I had lost someone of the magnitude of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. And I truly feel if he would have never been killed, he would have metamorphosed into one of the most powerful black men to ever walk the face of the earth."
And his restless, romantic spirit lives on. Dying young has a lot to do with that. And so does the extraordinary reverence he inspires in his successors in the hip-hop movement - artists like Eminem, Ja Rule, The Game and 50 Cent, whose own mythology of transgression, anger and run-ins with the law would not have been possible without Tupac's example.
In some ways, Tupac has become more vivid in death than he was in life. The music companies keep churning out albums, and they keep selling, better than they did when he was alive. Five of his eight number one records have been posthumous. His 1996 song "Hit 'Em Up" was recently listed as one of the top 10 songs that US soldiers listen to in Iraq. A movie script he wrote in the last year of his life, Live 2 Tell, has just been optioned by a production company called Insomnia Media and is expected to go into production sometime early next year. One of his admirers, the rap artist Muszamil, is busy lobbying to have his star imprinted on the pavement of the Walk of Fame along Hollywood Boulevard. And that's not to mention Ali G, whose inane hip-hop posturings wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for Tupac's romantic hold over the more unlovely reaches of West Staines.
Tupac's remains are spread as widely as his reputation. His ashes have been spread over different parts of Los Angeles, where he spent the last six years of his life. They have been dropped in the Pacific Ocean. Some have been sprinkled on his mother's garden, others on his aunt's garden. One of his bands, The Outlawz, mixed some up with marijuana and smoked them.
For the 10th anniversary of his death, which falls today, his mother Afeni Shakur had planned to fly to South Africa and sprinkle yet more ashes over Soweto, the very symbol of black resistance against white tyranny under apartheid. As it is, the trip has been postponed until next June, the anniversary of the 1976 Soweto uprising and the 36th anniversary of Tupac's birth.
Like Elvis, or Jim Morrison, Tupac is so vivid in the minds of some of his fans that they actually refuse to believe he is dead. The internet is full of conspiracy theories suggesting he did not die at all - that the videos and music churned out in the wake of his shooting was too prolific to have been based on pre-prepared material alone. A tongue-in-cheek story in this month's edition of the US magazine URB suggests he survived the assassination attempt in Las Vegas and is now considering a run for mayor in the Californian city of Oakland.
The facts of 10 years ago are, however, too stark to be denied. On September 7, 1996, Tupac and Suge Knight, the bruiser in charge of his label, Death Row Records, were in Las Vegas to see Mike Tyson box against Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand hotel-casino. After the fight, Tupac spotted a member of the Southside Crips gang called Orlando Anderson and immediately knocked him down and started beating him up, along with his entourage. Anderson and a group of fellow Crips had beaten up a Death Row employee in a shoe store a few weeks earlier, and this was straight revenge. (Both Tupac and Knight were affiliated with the Crips' arch-rivals, the Bloods.) Shortly afterwards, Tupac was riding in Knight's black BMW and heading to a Vegas club owned by Death Row Records when another car pulled alongside the two men at the junction of East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane. Four gunshots hit Tupac in the chest, arm and thigh. Knight was scratched by a piece of flying glass, but was otherwise unharmed.
An ambulance rushed Tupac to hospital, where he languished on life support for six days. But the injuries were just too extensive. The official cause of death was listed as respiratory failure and cardiac arrest. The big question, though, was the identity of his killer or killers - a question that has never been satisfactorily answered since.
Orlando Anderson was one obvious suspect. Some people thought Suge Knight himself might have ordered the hit, because of a dispute with his star over money - an unlikely scenario since he was in the car himself, but one that spoke to Knight's fearsome reputation and long rap sheet.
The most heavily explored theory is that Tupac was caught up in a deadly rivalry between West Coast rappers like himself and East Coast rappers including Sean "Puffy" Combs and Christopher Wallace, also known as Biggie Smalls or Notorious B.I.G. In November 1994, Tupac had been shot five times in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio, and he openly accused Combs and Wallace of responsibility - most notoriously in the song "Hit 'Em Up", in which he gets back at Wallace by claiming to have slept with his wife. The East Coast-West Coast theory went into overdrive after Wallace himself was shot dead outside a music awards ceremony in Los Angeles in March 1997, another crime that has yet to be solved.
The Tupac-Biggie mysteries have since turned into a mini-industry of their own, spawning investigative newspaper and magazine articles and documentary films including Nick Broomfield's 2002 stab at an explanation, Biggie and Tupac. For all the talk of high-level conspiracies and police cover-ups, however, the biggest obstacle to ascertaining the truth was probably the code of silence that many gangsta rappers and their hangers-on observed. These were people who harboured a deep distrust of the police, having either rapped against them or found themselves on the receiving end of a pair of handcuffs, and weren't inclined to reveal what they knew. A startling number of them - starting with Orlando Anderson - ended up dead in subsequent shootings, suggesting that whatever scores needed to be settled were settled outside the remit of law enforcement.
Tupac's fame, both during his life and after, was deeply bound up in the catalogue of real-life violence that mirrored the gangsta ethos of his music. He came from a revolutionary background - both his mother and his stepfather were heavily involved in the Black Panther movement, and his godfather was Geronimo Pratt, one of the movement's leading lights who was convicted of murdering a schoolteacher during a 1968 robbery.
His debut solo album, 2Pacalypse Now (1991), did not receive widespread notice until a young man in Texas killed a state trooper and claimed he had been inspired by Tupac's lyrics. Suddenly, the record became notorious - the then US Vice President Dan Quayle said it had "no place in our society".
From then on, his recording career and his criminal career were never far apart. In 1992, a six-year-old boy was killed in the crossfire as Tupac's friends and a rival gang engaged in a shoot-out in northern California. In October 1993, he shot two off-duty police officers he claimed were harassing a black motorist. Luckily for him, it turned out the two officers were drunk and carrying weapons stolen from an evidence locker, and he was not charged. Two months later, he was charged with anally raping a woman in his hotel room and encouraging his friends to follow suit. He was eventually convicted on three counts of sexual abuse, although some of the more serious charges were dropped.
Tupac's legal bills racked up so fast that even his soaring music sales couldn't cover them. To pay the $1.4m (£750,000) bail money to get out of prison pending appeal of his sexual abuse conviction, he had to turn to Suge Knight, who in turn extracted a commitment from Tupac to record three albums on his label.
It was a smart move by Knight: Tupac's previous album, Me Against The World, turned multi-platinum, largely thanks to the publicity surrounding the start of his prison term. He remains the only artist ever to reach number one while behind bars.
Tupac's murder sent his sales soaring into the stratosphere, along with his mythological status. By now, he's sold well over 70 million albums worldwide, making him the most successful rap star ever. He has also attracted the attentions of academics and cultural critics, who see in him a symbol of his times and a phenomenon who revolutionised popular culture, for both black and white young people, and straddled the boundary of gangsta fantasy and real-life crime in startling and unforgettable ways.
"Tupac was never the best rapper in terms of flow or lyrics," Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black popular culture at Duke University in North Carolina, told a newspaper interviewer this week. "But what enabled him to transcend everybody else in the room was that he had a sense of performance. When Tupac was onstage, in the broad sense, he always knew how to live up to the hype of the crowd - even if it was being wheeled out of the hospital the first time he was shot. He had that flair for the dramatic, which speaks to his real talent: as an actor."
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