Secret to winning the Booker? Make your hero a man
Male perspectives still dominate, say female winners of top literary prize
IT IS easier to win major literary awards by writing a lead character who is male, Man Booker Prize-winning authors have suggested, as they described the tendency as “concerning”.
Hilary Mantel, the only woman to have won the Man Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, the first two novels of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, said it “might be observed” that her success was made easier by having a male protagonist.
Saying the dismissal of women’s historical fiction had “sunk a lot of good writers” in the past, Mantel argued that female authors must be encouraged to be more ambitious to “embrace the totality” of the human experience in their novels.
Mantel, who appeared in conversation on stage at the Man Booker 50 festival in London, said her own work, and that of Pat Barker, a fellow award-winner, was “unexpected” for female writers, in that it “embraced the epic”.
Barker, who won the Booker in 1995 with The Ghost Road, said: “It does concern me slightly that the vast majority of Orange Prize [now known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction] winners do have male protagonists.
“I think when it’s roughly 50/50 we’ll know things are in a healthier state than they are at the moment.”
Eleanor Catton, who became the youngest Man Booker winner in 2013 with The Luminaries and was in the audience at the Southbank Centre, said the point about male protagonists was “definitely true” and she had noticed it in retrospect after the success of her own novel, which follows the fortunes of a 19th-century prospector, Walter Moody.
“I hope that it will be untrue at some point,” she said. “It has made me more determined to write from a female perspective from now on.”
She added that the male experience was still seen as “universal” while the female perspective was “exclusively the property of women”.
Just two Man Booker Prize winners this century have featured a sole female protagonist, the last time coming in 2007 with Anne Enright’s The Gathering.
Asked about her own career, Mantel said she had been met with a “general air of disbelief” when she announced she would write historical fiction in a publishing world that saw them as a “bodice-ripper”.
“I think it’s much better now. But I still think women writers need encouragement to be more ambitious and not to section off a part of the human experience as their own but to embrace the totality of it,” she said.
The Man Booker 50 festival continues today with talks from authors including Julian Barnes, Peter Carey, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, Paul Beatty, Michael Ondaatje and Eleanor Catton.