“Glaswegian author James Kelman is the UK’s contender in this year’s race for the Man Booker international prize, a clash of the world’s literary titans that pits such giants as the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa against Australia’s Booker prize-winning Peter Carey and the Nobel laureate VS Naipaul. … Well-known names on the shortlist include Canadian short story writer Alice Munro and American authors EL Doctorow and Joyce Carol Oates.”