US takes out Man Booker

GEORGE Saunders has become only the second US writer to win Britain’s renowned Man Booker Prize, which was awarded for his first full-length novel Lincoln in the Bardo.

Judges for the prestigious English-language literary award praised as “utterly original” the book that chronicles the death of Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie using the accounts of hundreds of narrators.

Saunders, 58, described the award as a “great honour, which I hope to live up to with the rest of my work, for the rest of my life”.