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Pankaj Mishra, Akhil Sharma in race for Booker nominations

Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics and Indian-American Akhil Sharma's An Obedient Father are in the race for the Booker Prize 2000 nominations to be announced in London on Thursday.

Three previous winners -- Michael Ondaatje for Anil's Ghost, A S Byatt for The Biographer's Tale and Kazuo Ishiguro for When We Were Orphans -- are frontrunners in the nomination race for the 21,000 pound literary award, judged this year by a five-member jury headed by writer-journalist Simon Jenkins.

Best-selling author Rose Tremain and The Sunday Times Literary Editor Caroline Gascoigne are also on the jury for the first Booker Prize of the new millennium.

Mishra's The Romantics, which is set in Banaras, and full-time investment banker Sharma's An Obedient Father, which talks about a turbulent New Delhi and Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, have won rave reviews in the West since their release early this year. Both are debut novels.

A two-time winner of the O'Henry award for short fiction, the New York-based Sharma's 'political novel' ignited controversy in the US when the New Yorker published an excerpt of the novel. The Harvard Law School graduate's graphic accounts of incest angered people.

An Obedient Father, whose title was found by his fiancee, who "went through Shakespeare with a highlighter", in King Lear, stretches back to the Partition and deals with corruption and communal violence in independent India.

"India soaked into my imagination. It became this place inside me I could turn to," says Sharma, whose family moved from Delhi to New Jersey when he was eight. At 28, he is working on a second novel.

Only two Indians -- Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy -- have won the prize in its 31-year history. Indian writers shortlisted for the coveted prize earlier were Anita Desai and Rohinton Mistry. Desai, whose novel Fasting, Feasting had a photo-finish with eventual winner J M Coetzee's Disgrace last year, has been shortlisted thrice.

Desai picked up her first nomination in 1980 for In Light of Day followed by In Custody (the novel which was adapted by Ismail Merchant for his Urdu film Muhafiz) four years later.

Mistry was shortlisted in 1991 for Such a Long Journey and again in 1996 for A Fine Balance.

All of Rushdie's novels, except The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which was surprisingly left out last year, have been shortlisted. Midnight's Children won him the prize in 1981 and later the 'Booker of Bookers'.

Another celebrated Indian, Vikram Seth, has never won a nomination. Both his novels -- the highly successful A Suitable Boy and the latest An Equal Music -- failed to make the shortlist drawing huge protests against the Booker Trust, which administers the prize.

The award will be announced at a gala dinner at London's Guildhall on November 7.

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