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Be an expert on the Booker Prize

By Ravi Agrawal for CNN

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So what is the prize all about?

The Man Booker Prize is one of the most famous literary awards in the world. Full-length, original novels written in English by citizens of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland and published in the last year are eligible. No Americans please -- stick to the Pulitzer! The prize generally leads to a jump in sales, potentially lucrative film and TV rights, and of course, fame and a £50,000 winner's cheque. Before you ask, it is not a prize restricted to men -- initiated in 1968 as the Booker Prize for fiction, it has been sponsored by the Man Group since 2002.

And the nominees are?

A long-list of 19 authors was released last month, whittled down on September 14 to a shortlist of six lucky authors: Kiran Desai for "The Inheritance of Loss," Kate Grenville for "The Secret River," M.J. Hyland for "Carry Me Down," Hisham Matar for "In the Country of Men," Edward St Aubyn for "Mother's Milk," and Sarah Waters for "The Night Watch." The bookmakers are picking Waters as their favorite, with Desai and Matar as the outsiders.

Tell me more about the favorites:

Waters was shortlisted in 2002 for "Fingersmith," and her latest work profiles four Londoners in a reverse chronology through World War II. The novel goes backwards in time from 1947 to 1944, and then further back to 1941. Londoners in 1947 would rarely talk about their experiences in the War, and Waters gently peels back the layers of hard times and trauma as her characters' histories are gradually revealed.

Desai, the daughter of the thrice-shortlisted Anita Desai, tells the story of an Anglophile judge in Kalimpong, India, and an orphan called Sai who lives with him and becomes romantically involved with the descendant of a Nepali Gurkha mercenary.

Matar is the dark-horse: a first-time author, his novel is about a young boy growing up in Colonel Gadhafi's repressive regime in Libya.

But beware if predicting the winner: Judges have been known to pick rank outsiders!

What's the buzz about this year's award?

The members of the longlist who didn't survive the second cut: Peter Carey, a winner in 1988 and 2001 for "Oscar and Lucinda" and "True History of the Kelly Gang" was surprisingly left out of the shortlist for "Theft: A Love Story." Two other former winners and longlist nominees this year, Barry Unsworth (1992's "Sacred Hunger") and Nadine Gordimer (1974's "The Conservationist") also missed out, for "The Ruby in Her Navel" and "Get a Life," respectively.

This year's winner will join the hallowed company of:

Nobel winners J. M. Coetzee (Booker winner for 1983's "Life & Times of Michael K") and V. S. Naipaul (1971's "In a Free State") and literary giants like Salman Rushdie (1981's "Midnight's Children") and Ian McEwan (1998's "Amsterdam.") Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" went on to win the "Booker of Bookers" in 1997 -- the best novel to win the prize in the first 25 years of the Booker Prize's existence.

If you don't read much:

You might have seen the film versions of the many Booker Prize winning novels to make the transition from page-turner to reel-burner: Thomas Kenneally's 1982 winner "Schindler's Ark" was filmed as the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List." "The Remains of the Day" and "The English Patient" are other Oscar-winning films that first made news as Booker winners for Kazuo Ishiguro in 1989 and Michael Ondaatje in 1992.

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