WINNING a Man Booker Prize usually translates to boomtime for the author.

Sales of the award-winning novel skyrocket, readers and libraries start poking about the writer's back catalogue of books and journalists around the world hound the winner for interviews.

It is no different for Anne Enright, who bagged the prestigious literary prize this year.

Established in 1969, the Man Booker Prize, originally the Booker Prize, is an annual award for the best English-language novel written by a citizen of Britain, Ireland or the Commonwealth.

The 45-year-old Irish author pipped hot favourites like British writer Ian McEwan and New Zealander Lloyd Jones to nab the award.

Her 272-page tome, The Gathering, which chronicles the disintegration of an Irish family, bagged her £52,500 (S$157,360), including the £2,500 awarded to the six shortlisted authors.

The other five were McEwan, Jones, Briton Nicola Barker, Pakistani Mohsin Hamid and Indian Indra Sinha.

Mr Kenneth Wong, merchandising manager of Times Bookstores, says: 'To us in the book trade, the Man Booker is the biggest prize. It's very prestigious and the award makes a book commercially viable.'

According to a report in British daily The Times last Thursday, 3,306 hardback copies and 381 paperback copies of Enright's novel have been sold since it was published in May.

Her publisher Jonathan Cape says Europe sales boost that figure to 35,000 and that winning the Man Booker Prize may quadruple her sales at least.

Indeed bookstores here reveal that the Man Booker Prize winners often enter bestsellers lists for at least a few weeks after the announcement of the award.

The literary prize has made the reputations of feted authors like McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and two-time winner J.M. Coetzee and launched the careers of many such as DBC Pierre, who won in 2003 for his debut Vernon God Little.

But the award has also been dogged by controversy since its inception 38 years ago.

Rushdie stirred up controversy with his 1981 win for Midnight's Children, which recasts the history of India from 1910 to 1976 through the eyes of Saleem Sinai who was born on the stroke of midnight of India's first independence day in 1947. Some critics sniped then that Rushdie's novel was anti-British and he was too unknown a writer.

Feminists also take up the charge that only 14 women have received the award, compared to 24 men.

Things came to a head in 1980 with the epic battle between two heavyweights - British novelists William Golding and Anthony Burgess. The well-documented spat between the two esteemed writers made the public sit up and take notice of the prize.

When Golding was crowned the winner for his novel Rites Of Passage, Burgess refused to attend the prize dinner.

Nowadays, the prize is criticised for favouring dark and unreadable novels.

One example is Scottish writer James Kelman's 1994 winning novel How Late It Was, How Late, which details the life of a working- class Scottish man Sammy in trouble with the law, written solely in impenetrable Glaswegian dialect. His later novels have not generated much interest from the public or critics.

Then there are those whose later endeavours have never eclipsed that of their Bookerwinning efforts.

Indian activist and writer Arundhati Roy, the 1997 Booker Prize-winner for The God Of Small Things, has all but abandoned fiction writing, preferring to publish essays and campaign for social causes.

Mr Kenny Leck, co-owner of local bookstore Books Actually, says: 'After Yann Martel's Life Of Pi (2002 winner), the Man Booker Prize winners seem to be losing a bit of their shine in Singapore.

'We stocked only 10 copies of last year's winner Kiran Desai's book and that took us nearly three months to move the entire stock. I move more Murakami books in three weeks.'

Is this the end of an era of soaring sales for serious fiction then, one which was ushered in by publishing giant Penguin in 1980 when it bought rights to most of the Man Booker nominees and launched them as paperbacks?

Ion Trewin, the administrator of the Man Booker Prize, thinks not.

He says via e-mail: 'Mohsin told me that the rights for his novel have been sold in 20 countries as a result of his being shortlisted. Some winners have sold 500,000 hardback copies upon winning - Arundhati Roy, DBC Pierre and Yann Martel to name but three. For serious literary fiction, that is an enormous achievement.'

Singapore poet Alvin Pang adds: 'One positive change is that we've seen the ascendancy of writers from the post-colonial world - India, Africa and Australia in particular, and more recently second- or third-generation British Asians.

'Post-colonial authors like V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie have clearly helped to wrest the chokehold on what makes good English writing away from the British and their subjects can be unapologetically non-Western.'

And to reach out to a wider global audience and shake off its stodgy image, the organisers of the Man Booker Prize plan to make its shortlisted novels available online free of charge.

Dr Ryan Bishop, associate professor at the National University of Singapore's Department of English Language and Literature, best sums up the Man Booker Prize's contribution to literature: 'It can lead readers to explore works that are under-appreciated and this is a boon for both readers and writers.'

junec@sph.com.sg

The Gathering by Anne Enright is available at Books Kinokuniya for $24.63 (with GST).

'It can lead readers to explore works that are under-appreciated and this is a boon for both readers and writers'

-NUS' Dr Ryan Bishop on the Man Booker Prize's contribution to literature