Author Hilary Mantel poses with her book ''Wolf Hall'' after winning the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction at the Guildhall in London October 6, 2009.

LONDON | Fri Oct 12, 2012 7:56am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - Hilary Mantel could become the first woman to win the coveted Man Booker Prize for fiction twice with her historical novel "Bring Up the Bodies", the bookmakers' favorite alongside Will Self's "Umbrella".

The annual literary award to an author from the Commonwealth, Zimbabwe or Ireland will be handed out at a glitzy dinner in London on Tuesday, and the build-up this year has been dominated by 60-year-old Mantel.

She won the Booker in 2009 with "Wolf Hall", her acclaimed 650-page historical novel charting Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in King Henry VIII's court, and is in contention again for the sequel.

Were she to win, she would become not only the first female the "do the double" but also the first British writer. South Africa-born J.M. Coetzee and Australian Peter Carey have won the prize twice.

"There has been discussion, I know, about the pros and cons of Mantel advancing so far in the prize again so soon," said Peter Stothard, chair of the Man Booker judging panel and editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

"The judges noted Mantel's even greater mastery of method now," he added.

Mantel could be back in the frame yet again in 2015, when the third and final installment of her Cromwell trilogy, "The Mirror and the Light", is due to hit the shelves.

"MOVING AND DRAINING"

The author has admitted that despite the trilogy's critical and commercial success so far, much was still riding on the final chapter of a 10-year writing odyssey.

"If I get the third book right then in a sense my whole life will have come right," she told Reuters in June. "But if I don't, then I am going to see it as a failure. In my mind it is all one long project."

Self's Umbrella was described by Stothard as "both moving and draining", a reference to some 400 pages without paragraph breaks or chapter divisions.

But he added that the tale about a misdiagnosed woman in a north London mental hospital would prove "much less difficult than at first it seems" to those who stuck with it.

Mantel and Self have taken turns at the top of bookmakers' betting lists.

Mantel edged out Self in odds offered by Paddy Power on Thursday with Bring Up the Bodies at 6/4 after leap-frogging Umbrella at 9/4.

But on Friday, Ladbrokes said Self had attracted a series of bets in the last two days making him 2/1 "hot" favorite ahead of Mantel at 5/2.

The other four shortlisted writers are Deborah Levy ("Swimming Home"), Malaysia's Tan Twan Eng ("The Garden of Evening Mists") and first-time novelists Alison Moore ("The Lighthouse") and Indian author Jeet Thayil ("Narcopolis").

The winner of the Man Booker Prize receives a cheque for 50,000 pounds ($80,000), international literary kudos and, perhaps most importantly, a significant spike in sales.

Research by the Guardian newspaper showed that Mantel's Wolf Hall, for example, sold 35,900 copies before the award was announced and nearly 600,000 afterwards.

The year before, Aravind Adiga's "The White Tiger" had sold just 5,703 copies before it won the Booker, rising nearly a hundredfold to 551,061 afterwards.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Steve Addison)

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A re-creation of Henry VIII's Imperial Crown is seen in this undated handout picture released in London October 8, 2012.

LONDON | Mon Oct 8, 2012 9:11am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - More than 450 years after adorning one of Britain's most famous regal heads, the lost crown of Henry VIII has been re-created at the monarch's former palace on the outskirts of London.

The crown, which was melted down in 1649 to swell government coffers following Oliver Cromwell's triumph over royal forces in England's civil war, has been assembled from detailed descriptions and portraits of the time.

Recorded as the "kingis crowne of golde" in a royal inventory in 1521, it was worn at the coronations of Henry's children Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, and later at those of James I and Charles I.

The replica weighs 3 kg (6.6 lbs) and is hand-crafted with 344 jewels and pearls. It will take center stage at Henry's Hampton Court Palace home when its Chapel Royal opens this month after seven years of restoration.

Simone Sagi, spokeswoman for Hampton Court, said the crown would only rarely have been seen in public.

"It was only worn on very major occasions such as Epiphany, and would have been worn on the processional route at Hampton Court Palace", she told Reuters.

The re-creation of the crown had involved a large variety of different teams and experts, including Harry Collins who retired this year as Crown jeweller.

It goes on display from October 27.

(Reporting by Stephen Eisenhammer)

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Mon Oct 8, 2012 2:22pm EDT

n">(Reuters) - Judy Garland's blue-and-white pinafore from the beloved classic "The Wizard of Oz" is going up for auction, where it is expected to sell for more than a half a million dollars, auctioneers said on Monday.

The outfit, consisting of the gingham dress and white puffy-sleeved blouse, which Garland wore throughout the 1939 film, will be sold next month at Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills, the auction house said in a statement.

Julien's estimated the outfit would sell for between $400,000 and $600,000, but similarly iconic Hollywood costumes have fetched many times the pre-sale expectations in recent years.

President Darren Julien told Reuters the dress, by MGM's famous costume designer, Adrian, had not been offered for sale, nor even publicly seen, since MGM costume designer Kent Warner sold it at Christie's in 1981.

"It's one of those key pieces that I'm sure collectors all over the world are going to be after," said pop culture expert Laura Woolley of the Collector's Lab, an appraisal service for collectors, museums and other institutions, in a YouTube clip posted by Julien's.

"This is one piece that everybody recognizes instantly," she said of the dress prominently featured in the Technicolor musical, which is still hugely popular with both children and adults nearly 75 years after it was made.

Another of Garland's dresses used in test shots for the film soared to nearly $1 million at auction last year, its $910,000 price more than 10 times the $60,000 to $80,000 estimate.

At the same sale of costumes from film star Debbie Reynolds' collection, which took in nearly $23 million, Marilyn Monroe's iconic "subway dress" from 1955 movie "The Seven Year Itch" sold for $4.6 million, or $5.5 million including commission and tax.

The "Wizard of Oz" dress will go on public exhibition at Julien's in Beverly Hills from November 5-8 ahead of the two-day auction.

Other Hollywood memorabilia on offer at the November 9-10 sale include the white strapless Edith Head gown worn by Elizabeth Taylor in "A Place in the Sun," which is estimated at $20,000 to $30,000, and a Cecil Beaton triptych of Marilyn Monroe, which hung in Monroe's New York apartment, estimated at $35,000 to $40,000.

(Reporting by Chris Michaud in New York, editing by Jill Serjeant and Andre Grenon)

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LONDON | Tue Oct 9, 2012 6:54am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - A toy gun-wielding child, New York high society at play and bored Tokyo commuters are just a few of the startling images at a new Tate Modern exhibition exploring the relationship between two of the 20th century's leading street-life photographers.

"William Klein + Daido Moriyama" features more than 300 vintage prints, paintings, original photo books and installations by U.S. photographers Klein and Japan's Moriyama in a show which runs from October 10 until January 20.

"We wanted to do a show where you have the (photo) book at the heart of the exhibition, particularly William Klein's book about New York, which is probably the most influential photo book of all time...and the idea of combining with Moriyama was natural because he was very influenced by William," co-curator Simon Baker told Reuters at a preview.

The two photographers are known for stark and candid photographs of street-life in the 1960s.

Huge black and white murals pasted to the Tate Modern's walls greet visitors, depicting the daily lives of people in New York, Tokyo and Moscow, capturing scenes of high society at a ball, children outside a candy store or commuters at a station.

Laid out as two halves of a conversation held between the two artists, visitors may recognize one of Klein's more famous portraits for fashion magazine Vogue on the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, where two elegantly dressed models wearing contrasting monochrome dresses are seen strutting on a zebra crossing surrounded by pedestrians and motorists.

Another picture, daubed with thick yellow paint, shows a young boy holding a toy gun aggressively towards the camera aiming directly at Klein, who produced a series of photo essays on New York, Rome and Tokyo each with his usual trademark wide-angle lens and candid close-ups of its citizens.

Moriyama's evocative images of Tokyo's actors and night performers, bored commuters at train stations, and a lone dog, which came to represent the artist in his later years, make up the second half of the show.

Rows of frames each featuring the carefully arranged juxtapositions of photographs from Moriyama's first photo book, "Japan: A Photo Theatre", are laid out page by page for visitors against a vast wall.

The show also features a series of close-ups of seemingly ordinary objects from clothing, machinery and flowers that are transformed with a play on light and shadow into surreal yet recognizable images.

If visitors manage to get some feeling of Japan or Tokyo in particular, then this would be great, Moriyama told Reuters, whose use of blurring, scratches and grainy visual effects in his book of abstract compositions "Sayonara Photography" has made it a lasting favorite.

"With most artists, they'll always say that (their) latest work is the best, or the next one they're producing is the best but at the same time, having looked around here, the one thing that does stick in my memory all the time, is 'Sayonara Photography'."

"That book, that collection...those are the ones that stayed with me throughout my career," Moriyama added.

The series has been described as some of the wildest photographs ever made, Baker added, who worked alongside co-curators Juliet Bingham and Kasia Redzisz.

"The photograph is being really pushed to the limit of what it can represent and I think this is something that is really important in both artists' work."

(Reporting by Li-mei Hoang, editing by Paul Casciato)

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STOCKHOLM | Mon Oct 8, 2012 5:24am EDT

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - The 2012 Nobel Literature Prize will be announced at 7 a.m. EDT on Thursday, organizers said, with Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami the bookmakers' favorite to win the 8 million crown ($1.2 million) award.

Other hotly-tipped names include Bob Dylan, Chinese writer Mo Yan and reclusive U.S. novelist Thomas Pynchon.

Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer won last year, pleasing many in the prize's homeland which had not celebrated a winner since Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson took home the prize in 1974.

Past winners include U.S. writer William Faulkner, France's Albert Camus and Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The last Japanese writer to win the prize was Kenzaburo Oe in 1984.

The award-giving body The Swedish Academy, which announced the date of the literature prize on Monday, is due to announce the winners of its coveted science prizes this week. ($1 = 6.5846 Swedish crowns)

(Reporting by Simon Johnson; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

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Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange at the opening of the trading session in New York October 5, 2012.

NEW YORK | Tue Oct 9, 2012 9:39am EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks edged lower after the open on Tuesday with investors having little reason to buy equities after the recent rally as they waited for the start later on Tuesday of the U.S. quarterly earnings season.

The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI was down 22.73 points, or 0.17 percent, at 13,560.92. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index .SPX was down 2.27 points, or 0.16 percent, at 1,453.61. The Nasdaq Composite Index .IXIC was down 9.84 points, or 0.32 percent, at 3,102.52.

(Reporting by Ryan Vlastelica; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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