SOURCE: Moseley, Merritt. “The Booker Prize for 1999.” Sewanee Review 108, no. 4 (fall 2000): 648-55.

In the following essay, Moseley notes that Headlong, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize, was his personal choice to win the award, asserting that Headlong is “a novel of lasting significance.”

The Booker Prize for fiction was awarded on October 25, 1999, to the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee for Disgrace. Coetzee thus became the first author in the thirty-year history of the prize to win it a second time (his The Life and Times of Michael K won in 1983). Disgrace was chosen from a short list of titles, announced a month earlier, that also included Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting; Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love; Andrew O'Hagan's Our Fathers; Michael Frayn's Headlong; and Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship. Including an Irish author, a Scot, an Indian, an Egyptian, a South African, and a...