Monica Ali lone Asian in Booker list

Promising writer Monica Ali is the lone Asian novelist left in the shortlist for the 2003 Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious annual fiction award worth £50,000. A new generation of women authors dominated the shortlist of six. The list includes four women, three debut novelists and one writer who could be described as a household name — Margaret Atwood.

Atwood’s Onyx and Crake was the early favourite, but she was immediately challenged by Monica Ali, the Bangladeshi-born Londoner whose Brick Lane was hailed by the judges as ‘‘an extraordinary first novel’’. Others reaching the list with their first published books were the British music teacher Clare Morrall and the Australian-born D.B.C. Pierre, 42, who lives in Ireland. The list is completed by Zoe Heller and Damon Galgut.

Ali, 35, was born in Dhaka and moved to the north of England with her family. The Oxford student secured a £200,000 advance on the strength of the first six chapters of her book, which tells the story of a Bangladeshi girl who comes to England for an arranged marriage and has to adapt to life in an East End tower block.

Ali had started writing fiction as an antidote to the ‘‘drudgery of domestic chores’’ after the birth of her first child. She was on Granta’s list of Britain’s best young novelists before Brick Lane even hit the shelves and last night the judges acclaimed it as extraordinary, extremely funny and very subtle. (PTI)