Claps for chaps

The Women’s Prize for Fiction is announced on

7 July, with an impressive shortlist including Susanna Clarke,

Claire Fuller and Patricia Lockwood. Its very existence has led to the usual complaints that there is no corresponding Men’s Prize for Fiction. Usually, this moaning is dismissed as misogynistic ranting, but surely some provocateur could fund such an award.

Its entry requirements should be deeply stringent. Its winner would have to be white, British, privately educated (but only at one of the nine establishments laid down by the Public Schools Act of 1868), an Oxbridge graduate (who had attended one of a specified number of “approved” colleges: no seventeenth century or later muck), aged over 30 (as youth does not beget experience) and under 60 (as age dulls the senses and appetite).

Its recipient would have to make a Munnings lambasting Picasso at the Royal Academy in ‘49-esque speech. These sallies could include (but are not limited to) children’s books written by celebrities, tiresome navel-gazing memoirs written by nobodies, unreadable “literary novels” from graduates of expensive creating writing courses, and anything that wallows in misery that make the Four Yorkshireman sound chipper.

It should be sold as a diversity exercise of course — “to bring men back to reading books”. Everyone would be happy, carefully curated craft ales would be drunk, and all would be as once it was.