Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Tonight's the night. If you love books, you'll surely know that the winner of this year's Booker Prize will be announced at a ceremony in the British Museum, which will be broadcast live on BBC Two and BBC Four. To the winner goes prospects of vast sales, lucrative paperback rights, loads of publicity and £50,000 — a handsome £30,000 increase on the amount given to Peter Carey, who won last year. The generosity is directly related to the fact that the prize has a new sponsor, the Man financial group. Actually, the prize is now officially known as the Man Booker Prize.

And who's going to win the most prestigious award given to British, Irish and Commonwealth fiction writers? Well, it won't be Zadie Smith, Will Self or Howard Jacobson as neither of these celebrity authors made it from the "long list" to the "short list" issued on 24 September. By the way, William Boyd, Anita Brookner, Michael Frayn and Colin Thubron didn't even make the long list. Tonight's candidates are: Yann Martel for Life of Pi, Rohinton Mistry for Family Matters, Carol Shields for Unless, William Trevor for The Story of Lucy Gault, Sarah Waters for Fingersmith and Tim Winton for Dirt Music.

As soon as the short list was made public, bookmakers William Hill made Trevor 9-4 favourite to win, followed by Winton at 3-1 and Martel at 9-2. And then came a classic moment that showed how subversive our new technologies can be. The bookies reported a huge increase in bets on Martel's book — with some people betting up to £100. Why? Simple. The Booker site published a page declaring it had won the prize. The red-faced organisers said that the page had "accidentally" made its way online while being prepared. According to a spokeswoman, the web team had prepared six different pages saying each shortlisted author had won, to be ready for each possibility tonight. Happens, I suppose. Sounds, though, as if they need a little help with their content management system and editing workflow.

Anyway, William Hill immediately suspended betting, which was rather a pity as I was getting ready to have a flutter. My heart was saying William Trevor, partly because he was born in Mitchelstown, a County Cork market town located seven miles from where I was raised, and partly because he's been shortlisted three times already for writing that has a poetic beauty about it. That's the heart; the head says Sarah Waters. She's on a roll these days. Her first novel, the lesbian historical romance Tipping the Velvet, is being dramatised for television in an adaptation described gleefully as "filthy". Fingersmith is an intricate thriller set in the underworld of the "fingersmiths", or pickpockets, of 1860s London and the Daily Telegraph's Helen Brown has called it "unabashedly sensational".

Sounds exactly like the kind of "new era" writing that Booker jury chair Lisa Jardine favours.