Booker and Nobel prizes are not perfect stories

The recent announcement of the winners of two of the world’s most prestigious and valuable literary prizes has sparked plenty of controversy and debate.

First, there was the announcement of the Nobel prize. After 2018’s shocking and deeply embarrassing sexual harassment scandal, which tore apart the Swedish academy responsible for awarding the prize, the failure to award a prize then was redressed by the announcement of two winners in 2019.

The winner of the prize for 2018 was Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, whose lifelong struggle for the rights of women and unflinching ability to ask difficult questions of her country’s readers and citizens sat well enough with an audience waiting to see how the newly formed academy would deliver on its promise that 2019’s announcements would show dedication to making its focus less Eurocentric and male-dominated.

Tokarczuk’s politics were sound enough and her writing undeniably original enough to warrant the recognition.

The same could not be so easily said for Austrian author Peter Handke, the winner of the 2019 Nobel award. Handke, now in his 70s, has enjoyed a cult following among the European literati for his work as a playwright, but he’s also been hounded by controversy.

He was an outspoken champion of war criminal and Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević and questioned the veracity of the infamous Srebrenica massacre.

The question of how the newly constituted academy believes its announcements have shown a willingness to overcome some of its past myopia has not been properly addressed. It is evident the world’s most valuable literary award is still prone to the pressures placed on many similar awards by the tensions of merit versus message.

Those tensions were made even more obvious by the Booker Prize announcement.

The Booker has not been without controversy in its 50year history. The prize had, before this year, been shared twice. But after 1992 the Booker’s committee introduced a rule that the prize would have to be awarded to a single author only. This year the judges rejected that rule in spite of directives from the prize’s literary director, Gaby Wood, that they make a one-author decision. The award was thus shared by Margaret Atwood for

The Testaments and Bernardine

Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other.

At the heart of the matter is that sticky question of merit versus message. In Atwood’s case, her long-awaited sequel to her seminal 1985 novel The

Handmaid’s Tale has been lauded by critics and hungrily devoured by readers. Atwood was hotly placed to win the prize in 1986 but lost out to Kingsley Amis, with his comic novel The Old Devils. She did go on to win the Booker in 2000 for The Blind Assassin.

However, it’s the message of this novel which builds on the charged feminism and prochoice vision of the original to deliver an equally trenchant warning about the new threats to women and the urgent need for radical changes in the face of the menace of the Trump era that seems to have made the judges dig in their heels.

Evaristo is the first black British author to win the prize and her novel deals with the equally urgent subject of the realities of modern black women in Britain. It’s been hailed by many as the ultimate realisation of its author’s 25year dedication to address the question of “what it means to not see yourself reflected in your nation’s stories”.

Faced with two books focused on two undeniably important issues, the Booker judges, rather than take a final position on which book should win based on literary merit, decided they could not be divided based on messaging.

Literary prizes are naturally and rightfully prone to the tastes and personalities of the people tasked with deciding them and the political and social tastes of the times.