New Zealand's Lloyd Jones was a fast-rising favorite while Ian McEwan was hoping to make it a double as judges met Tuesday to award Britain's most prestigious - and contentious - literary trophy, the Man Booker Prize. Jones'"Mister Pip" and McEwan's "On Chesil Beach" were favorites to take the $100,000 prize, announced at a ceremony in London's medieval Guildhall later Tuesday. But the Booker has a history of producing surprise results. McEwan is the best-known nominee, a best seller who has won the Booker once before, for "Amsterdam" in 1998. But some have argued that "On Chesil Beach," the finely wrought tale of a disastrous wedding night and its consequences in early 1960s England, is technically a novella, not a novel.

McEwan said last week that the debate did not concern him.

"You allow yourself the possibility of writing in real time," McEwan told an audience at the New Yorker Festival last week. "It could never be a long novel."

Jones has published seven previous novels but is little known to readers outside of New Zealand, Australia and the region. "Mister Pip" is set at the start of Papua New Guinea's civil war in the early 1990s, and centers on a teacher introducing village children to Charles Dickens'"Great Expectations."

Bookmaker Ladbrokes had McEwan as the 6-4 favorite, while its rival William Hill made Jones the front-runner, also at 6-4 odds.

"It's the biggest gamble we've ever seen on a Booker Prize," said William Hill's Graham Sharpe. "He's gone from 20-1 outsider to favorite."

Betting on literary prizes - as well as on television reality shows, election results and potential royal weddings - is a long-standing tradition in Britain. Sharpe said a win by Jones would "cost us a six-figure payout."

The Booker judges have a history of defying the odds when awarding the prize, which usually brings a huge sales boost for the winner. The favorite has not won since 2002, when Yann Martel's "Life of Pi" took the prize.

There was also a buzz around Mohsin Hamid's "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," the story of a middle-class Pakistani in New York whose relationship with his adopted home changes radically after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The other nominees are English writer Nicola Barker's "Darkmans," a sprawling supernatural saga set in the town of Ashford in southern England, hailed by the panel as "an ambitious and energetic contemporary ghost story"; "The Gathering," a family epic set in England and Ireland by Irish author Anne Enright; and "Animal's People," a novel about the Bhopal chemical disaster by India's Indra Sinha.

The prize, which is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies, was founded in 1969 and was long known as the Booker Prize. It was renamed when the financial services conglomerate Man Group PLC began sponsoring it five years ago.

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On the Net:

http://www.themanbookerprize.com

Written By JILL LAWLESS