British author Hilary Mantel is favourite to scoop the Man Booker Prize tonight, while South African-born JM Coetzee is in the running to become the first writer to win the coveted award three times.
Mantel (57), has been shortlisted for Wolf Hall, about the life and times of Thomas Cromwell.
"There's only one name on literary punters' lips," said Nick Weinberg of bookmakers Ladbrokes, adding that the novel had attracted over 80 per cent of all bets. "It will be a huge surprise if she fails to secure the prize."
The winner, selected by a five-member jury from English-language works by authors from the Commonwealth and Ireland, receives a cheque for £50,000 but can also expect to see sales rise sharply amid a publicity blitz.
Critics have praised Wolf Hall, a work of historical fiction which opens with Cromwell as victim of his violent father and picks up his story when he is in the service of Cardinal Wolsey.
He rises through the ranks to become one of King Henry VIII's most trusted aides, helping the monarch in his attempts to break with the papacy in Rome.
"Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics," the Booker judges said on the prize's website.
Coetzee, who won the prize in 1983 with Life and Times of Michael Kand in 1999 with Disgrace, is in contention again with Summertime, the story of a young biographer who is working on a book about the late writer John Coetzee.
The work completes a trilogy of fictionalised memoirs for Nobel laureate Coetzee (69), following Boyhoodand Youth.
Another previous Booker winner on the shortlist this year is A.S. Byatt, whose Possessiontriumphed in 1990.
The 73-year-old has been nominated for The Children's Book, the tale of a famous writer who pens a separate, private book for each of her children, complete with family mysteries.
The youngest author on the 2009 shortlist is Adam Foulds, born in 1974, whose novel The Quickening Mazeis based on real events that took place at an asylum near London in the 1840s.
The book tells the story of the incarceration of nature poet John Clare, who struggled with alcoholism, critical neglect and depression.
A novel about a house in Czechoslovakia owned by a newly married couple, the Landauers, is the basis for Simon Mawer's entry on the list, The Glass Room. The Jewish-Gentile couple prepare to flee as the threat of the second World grows.
Rounding out the shortlist is The Little Strangerby Sarah Waters, which tells of Dr Faraday, who returns to a house, Hundreds Hall, that he has not seen for decades only to realise how the family home has declined.
Reuters