Rohinton Mistry inches closer to Booker

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal">LONDON: For the third time, Canada-based Indian writer Rohinton Mistry has arrived on Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize shortlist, but all the world’s attention is focused on a great literary churning across the Commonwealth, which has forced Booker judges to pronounce a remarkable fatwa on "pompous fiction".<br />Mistry, one of three fellow-Canadians on the shortlist, may be hoping to be third time lucky, even though <span style="" font-style:="" italic="">Family Matters</span>, his "big, big-hearted tale" about an elderly Parsi gentleman in Mumbai has been commended but won few ecstatic reviews.<br />But the biggest story of the Booker Prize, long a symbol of quality writing, is the new literary fatwa and the judges’ appeal for "fun, readable fiction".<br />The award, now worth more than twice as much as when Arundhati Roy won its £20,000 prize money in 1997, is threatening to expand its empire and throw the field open to writers from beyond the Commonwealth.<br />The planned expansion, possibly due by 2004, is expected to make it harder all around, not least for India, which has not had a win since Roy’s The God of Small Things.<br />The Prize, with a new sponsor and a new name, the Man Booker, has courted controversy by failing to shortlist for the second year running Britain’s best-selling young multi-cultural chronicler, Zadie Smith.<br />Instead, the 2002 shortlist includes Mistry’s fellow-Canadians Yann Martel and Carol Shields, apart from William Trevor, Sarah Waters and Tim Winton.<br />In a statement, the judges commended "The strong showing of Commonwealth writers", which they said showed "the real importance of the Prize''s criteria for entry".</div> </div>