Dangor content with reaching wider audience

Achmat Dangor, author of 'Bitter Fruit'

Achmat Dangor, the South African-born writer shortlisted for the Booker prize is content about helping "SA writing to reach a much wider audience", despite not winning the coveted accolade.

Cangor's novel, Bitter Fruit has been selling in the tens of thousands since it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a level of commercial success he says he never expected. "My book was a little tiny book published in South Africa and the United States and now they tell me 30 000 copies sold in two weeks in the UK. That is significant."

Previous winners of the Booker prize include Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee, who won it twice.

Dangor said: "I think the Booker Prize brings books to a wider range of people than they would ordinarily see. Books from not just around Britain but from around the Commonwealth. There's an interest in new writing from South Africa."

The 2004 Man Booker Prize was won by British-born writer, Alan Hollinghurst, for his novel The Line of Beauty.