Hilary Mantell favorite to win 2009 Man Booker

Hilary Mantel has taken literary gamblers by storm; of the thirteen contenders on the Man Booker Prize for Fiction longlist released this week, ninety-five percent of gamblers have placed bets on her Wolf Hall to take the big prize in October, leading oddsmakers to call Mantel's win a shoe-in.

Wolf Hall follows Thomas Cromwell's scandalous influence in the sixteenth-century court of Henry VIII. The book has received glowing attention from BBC2 recently, a possible source of its favoritism in the race.

The Derbyshire-born author has published twelve books--including a memoir and a short story collection--since 1985 and has been shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize in recent years. Her stiffest competition this year is from South African Nobel laureate JM Coetzee.

In September, the longlist will be reduced to six nominees, and from those six one will win the £50,000 prize at London's Guildshall on October 6.