Booker beats the odds

Robert McCrum: Despite a difficult shortlist full of worthy potential winners, the jury has pulled it off again.

Desai’s Booker win: what the papers said

Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss: set in India, written in India, with Indian bits, according to the Times of India. Photograph: PA If the bookies were confounded, the commentators were astonished. Was it one of the Booker's famous compromise decisions? No, insisted Hermione Lee, the chair of judges. There was "no ambiguity" about the decision. So how did the two favourites, "the Welsh lesbian author" (copyright Daily Mail) Sarah Waters and "the former heroin addict" (ditto) Edward St Aubyn get knocked out by a 35-year-old with a second novel?

Outsider Desai takes Booker prize

Well, who'd have thought it? Not the bookies, clearly - they rated her as a 5-1 outsider. But the judges disagreed, and awarded this year's prize to Kiran Desai, the daughter of thrice Booker-nominated Anita, for The Inheritance of Loss, her novel of family, love and politics set in the foothills of the Himalaya.

Art 2, Books 0

Robert McCrum: The Booker prize won't be televised this year. Perhaps it should not have presented itself quite so much like a horse race.

The Guardian profile: David Mitchell

With his two previous novels both shortlisted for the Booker, so it was no great surprise when David Mitchell's Black Swan Green leapt to the front as the bookies' favourite when the 2006 Booker longlist was announced this week. How did an anxious child with a bad stammer rise to become a novelist of such critical and popular acclaim?

Banville scoops the Booker

John Banville, with his Booker-winning novel, last night Photograph: GettyThis year's £50,000 award has gone to John Banville, who beat favourites Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro to the gong with The Sea, a melancholy, literary meditation on grief and memory, in a contest which chairman of the judges Professor John Sutherland described as "painful" in its closeness (read the story in full here). There's no doubt that this is a shock result: Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of The Independent, described it as "possibly the most perverse decision in the history of the award". Meanwhile, Tibor Fischer, writing in the Guardian today, called The Sea "a book that won't do the Booker's reputation much good", and went on to say that "I reviewed The Sea three months ago and I'm afraid I can't remember anything about it, apart from the fact that it was set by the sea ... "

Go on, then – who’s going to win?

There's a slight sense of "What? Already?" about this year's Booker prize. Despite a shortlist featuring Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith, it's been a very quiet run-up, news-wise - you might, as Robert McCrum did in yesterday's Observer, describe it as an orgasm without much foreplay - and as a result, tonight's ceremony has rather crept up us. So let's get into the spirit of the thing now with a rousing discussion on who you think will win, who you think really deserves to win, and why.