The winner of Britain’s Man Booker prize for literature is announced on Tuesday, but the ceremony has been overshadowed by the launch of a rival award that claims the Booker has become too populist.
Julian Barnes remains the favourite for his novel The Sense of an Ending, while debut novelists Stephen Kelman and A. D. Miller are also among the six finalists, made up of four Britons and two Canadians.
One of the highest-profile awards in English-language literature, the £50,000 annual Booker is awarded for the best work of fiction by an author from the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.
But this year’s shortlist has disappointed the London’s literati, while there has also been criticism of the fact that the prize judges include a former head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5. Last week an anonymous group calling itself “The Advisory Board of the Literature Prize” said it planned to knock the Man Booker off its perch as the benchmark of literary taste.
The “Literature Prize” would also include novels by American writers in the hunt for the “best novel written in the English language and published in the UK in a given year.”
In a statement issued on last Wednesday, the board for the new prize said it would honour novels that were “unsurpassed in their quality and ambition”, saying that “for many years this brief was fulfilled by the Booker.”
“But as numerous statements by that prize’s administrator and this year’s judges illustrate, it now prioritises a notion of ‘readability’ over artistic achievement,” the board said. Supporters of the new award include former Booker winners John Banville and Pat Barker and leading British authors Mark Haddon, Jackie Kay and David Mitchell. — AFP