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Uproar as Americans join Man Booker party
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No one but the jurors can say which of six short-listed books will receive the Man Booker Prize for fiction on October 15, but one thing for certain is the Americans are coming into the competition next year and the literary world is in an uproar.
It has been a week since the organizers of the prestigious prize for English-language fiction that had been reserved for writers from the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Commonwealth threw open the doors to Americans and authors from all countries writing in English. Words of praise and dismay keep flowing.
A blog by British writer Philip Hensher in the Guardian was headlined: “Well, that’s the end of the Booker prize, then.” But a piece by novelist Sophie Hardach in the online edition of US-based the Atlantic bore the headline: “Of course the Booker Prize should get more inclusive — because English has.”
In the 40-plus years since the first award in 1969, the prize originally known as the Booker has helped launch the careers of a host of now famous authors, from Nigerian Ben Okri, who won for his “The Famished Road” in 1991, to Irish writer Anne Enright, who won the 2007 Man Booker for “The Gathering.”
Now the prize will be open from 2014 to what some literary agents and authors in Britain see as a better-funded, more cohesive literary scene in the United States.
They note that the United States has a host of prestigious prizes, such as the Pulitzer and the National Book Award — many open only to Americans — plus well-funded writing courses at universities.
“If anything I’m a bit saddened” by the opening up to competition from America, Lisa Eveleigh of the Richard Becklow Literary Agency in London, said.
“I don’t think writers get the help here that they get in America and I don’t frankly think America needs it.”
In announcing the change, Jonathan Taylor, chairman of the Booker Prize Foundation that bestows the honour, said: “The prize is now widely regarded as the most important and influential award for literary fiction in the English-speaking world. But paradoxically, it has not allowed full participation for all those writing literary fiction in English.
“It’s rather as if the Chinese were excluded from the Olympics.”
There is, though, a line of thought which has it that Britain working with its former colonies grouped as the Commonwealth for sporting events, trade and a literary prize celebrates a common heritage — one that America rejected in 1776.
But Irish novelist and 2007 winner Enright said, in effect, that it was time to move beyond queen, country and Commonwealth.
“The English language book market is ... becoming more international, especially with the rise of the ebook,” Enright told the Irish Times.
“It is inevitable that a major prize should reflect this globalization.
“I always felt the Commonwealth plus Ireland was a bit of a post-imperial, sun-setting-over-the- empire kind of categorisation,” Enright said.
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