CRITICS FEAR A GLOBALISED BOOKER PRIZE
The British literary world takes fright as a traditional bulwark against the spread of the American novel falls, raising fears small literary works will be crushed By Steven Erlanger
The Americans are coming, and the British literary world is not happy. The Man Booker Prize, which had been open to Englishlanguage novels from Britain and the Commonwealth, has just gone global, producing anxiety about damage to cultural diversity and fears that the US cultural hyperpower that dominates movies and television will crush the small literary novel.
‘‘It’s rather like a British company being taken over by some worldwide conglomerate,’’ said Melvyn Bragg, an author and television host in Britain.
The Booker Prize for fiction, launched in 1969, was always something that Britain and its former territories could call their own, seen as a bulwark against the spread of the American novel, that globalised product of the world’s richest market.
The award — with its publicity, its paycheck and its immediate effect on sales — has been an important boost to the careers of Canadians such as Michael Ondaatje and Yann Martel and Indians such as Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga. It has brought attention to novelists previously unknown and unpublished in the US, and it has been an important source of encouragement for publishers of quality fiction.
This week, Booker Prize Foundation chairman Jonathan Taylor said: ‘‘We are abandoning the constraints of geog- raphy and national boundaries’’ to become a truly international prize, as a result of consultations that began in 2011.
The change could enhance the Booker’s ‘‘prestige and reputation through expansion, rather than by setting up a separate prize’’ for US novelists, he said.
Next year the prize will be open to anyone writing in English, not just citizens of Britain, the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe, bringing immediate concerns that US novels will dominate ‘‘simply through an economic superpower exerting its own literary tastes,’’ said British novelist Philip Hensher, who has been both a Booker finalist and a judge.
More troubling, he said, will be the loss of ‘‘new, interesting voices’’. US novels are already culturally dominant, he said.
‘‘It’s hard to think of American novels that don’t make their way into the larger English world, but I can think of Canadian, Indian and African novels that struggle to find a broader readership.’’
Criticism of the prize has been a literary sport since its inception, with complaints about the winners, the judges and even the prize dinners. AL Kennedy, who was a judge in 1996, famously and ungrammatically said that the winner was determined by ‘‘who knows who, who’s sleeping with who, who’s selling drugs to who, who’s married to who, whose turn it is’’.
Kennedy is in favour of the expansion of the Booker, however, noting that other, newer prizes open to any Englishlanguage novel, such as the Folio Prize (£40,000 pounds, or about 2 million baht, which makes its first award next January) and the International Impac Dublin Literary Award (€100,000 euros, or about 4.2 million baht, and also open to translations) have been ‘‘nipping at its heels’’. The Man Booker award comes with a prize of £60,000.
The Booker has also become less literary, some argue, suggesting that since the Man Group, a multinational financial company, took it over in 2002, the renamed Man Booker Prize has become more middlebrow.
Even this year, one of the six finalists, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Lowland, has been criticized as an ‘‘American’’ novel. Born in London, of Indian heritage, Lahiri moved to the United States at the age of two and generally writes about the experience of exiles living in the US.
‘‘She’s an American novelist, not a Bengali novelist,’’ Hensher said. ‘‘Novels about Indians who leave their exotic homeland and live in New Jersey are fine, but they shouldn’t crowd out those who write about their own culture.’’
Hensher likes the American novel. But ‘‘the big novel that speaks to all the world is not at the heart of literary achievement’’, he said. ‘‘Some very fine novels seem to speak much more to one culture than another and are rooted in something local.’’
Jim Crace, whose novel Harvest is a finalist for this year’s prize, said the Man Booker would lose focus and diminish the concept of the Commonwealth.
‘‘I think prizes need to have their own characters, and sometimes those characters are defined by their limitations,’’ he said.
Part of the effect of the Booker comes from the publication of a ‘‘longlist’’ of semi-finalists and then a ‘‘shortlist’’ of six finalists, both of which bring attention to younger writers unlikely to win and to smaller publishers. The concern is that these lists will be dominated by US novelists, driving out others, diminishing the chances of a broader public discovering something daring, unfamiliar or new.
Since the judges are still required, at least in principle, to read every entry, publishers will now be allowed to nominate only one novel, rather than two, which means that smaller publishers will have fewer chances to get on a shortlist. Exceptions are made for publishers that have had a finalist in the past five years.
‘‘It means the prize will be dominated by big publishing houses who maybe aren’t taking as many risks,’’ Anne Meadows, an editor at Granta Books, said. ‘‘Good novels will be overlooked.’’