Why I’m done with the Man Booker Prize and you should be too.
How the Man Booker 50 festival confirmed my worst fears about the prize: A thoroughly researched rant.
On Sunday 8th July I attended some of the events held at the Southbank Centre in London as part of the Man Booker Prize 50 Festival. A weekend of events to celebrate the prize’s fifty-year history. I was excited to be attending some of the Man Booker 50 events as well as the Golden Man Booker ceremony. Much of my academic work over the past 7 years has concerned itself with literary award culture and prize cultures more broadly, and the buzz around the Man Booker Prize has been ubiquitous throughout this time.
A lot of people have a strong personal relationship to the Man Booker Prize. At the Golden Man Booker ceremony (which you can watch here) Kamila Shamsie mentioned how, when she was growing up in Karachi in the 1980s and 90s, her mother (also a writer) would always try to find and read the Booker winners and shortlistees. As a result, Shamsie said, when she started to read “adult” books as a teenager, they were often Booker prize winning books. For me, however, the Man Booker Prize wasn’t a cultural phenomenon I grew up knowing about. In fact, I didn’t really have a sense of what the Man Booker Prize was until I became a bookseller while studying for my undergraduate degree. I enjoyed setting up displays for the award winning/shortlisted books because it felt like something special which raised the profiles of the authors and books who sat languishing amongst hundreds and thousands of the other books on the shelves.
The moment at which the Man Booker Prize piqued my interest the most was in 2011 when the infamous ‘readability’ saga unfolded. The chair of the 2011 Man Booker Prize jury, Stella Rimington, was lambasted when she said: ‘We want people to buy these books and read them, not buy them and admire them.’ Rimington’s comments, and the jury’s apparent ‘prioritization of ‘readability’’ would, John Self argued in The Guardian, ‘squande[r] the award’s prestige and is actually putting some readers off’. I didn’t realise it then, but I now believe the reason why this was the point at which the Man Booker Prize caught my attention was because this event seemed to epitomise the aura of condescension and exclusion that the Man Booker Prize generates and perpetuates year on year. And, for me, this prohibitive approach to literature and cultural production came to a head at the Man Booker 50 Festival.
My first issue with the festival was the ticket price points. Event ticket prices ranged from £10 to £40 (although there was one free (but ticketed) event, Howard Jacobson’s ‘Why the Novel Matters’ keynote on Saturday morning).* Three events were £10: ‘How to Find a Literary Agent’, ‘How to Get Published’ and ‘How to Edit Your Novel’ targeted directly at aspiring writers and, given that we know writers find it incredibly difficult to earn a living from their craft, perhaps these low ticket prices were meant to make these events accessible to budding writers. There was one event for £15, which was a screening of The English Patient followed by Q&A with Michael Ondaatje. So, of the twenty-one events over the weekend, just five were under £20 to attend. The average price of the sixteen remaining events (taking the upper-price point (£40) of events with a range from £20 — £40) is £27.31 per ticket (this is not including booking transaction fees and delivery charges if you want them sent by post). There was a multi-buy discount available for multiple bookings in the same transaction (20% for two events, 30% for three or more) but there was no option to purchase weekend or day passes.
Now, I understand that these kinds of events are expensive to run. Authors need to be paid, their travel/accommodation covered, the venue needs to cover staffing costs and marketing/promotion costs (and while I don’t know for sure the kinds of expenses that the ticket price was covering, it’s likely that these are some of them). I certainly don’t expect authors and venue staff to give their time for free. However (and this is a big however), the ticket prices were prohibitively expensive for a lot (if not most) people. The Southbank Centre does have an allocation of discount tickets for events (‘25% discount is available for recipients of Universal or Pension Credit, full-time students and those under the age of 16’), but these are limited and work on a first-come-first-serve basis (and I’m not even 100% sure the Man Booker 50 Festival was included in this offer, there is nothing on the programme that says so). It is not enough to simply say ‘London is expensive’ and ‘literary events are expensive’ in response to these kinds of ticket prices. I think this kind of price-point is making a statement. It is saying: ‘If you can afford to join us, you are welcome. If not, this conversation (about literature) is not for you.’
This sense of cultural and socio-economic exclusion was further reinforced at some of the events I attended. One of the talks I had been most looking forward to was ‘The Future of the Novel’ with Anne Enright, David Grossman, Marlon James and Howard Jacobson (although Jacobson wasn’t originally listed in the programme). Despite my excitement for this event (I was particularly keen to hear from Marlon James since he’s spoken before about the problems with contemporary publishing and its lack of diversity), I was slightly sceptical. I’m a researcher of twenty-first century book cultures and publishing and, over the past five to ten years (and probably longer), these academic fields have been bogged down by debates concerning the death of the book and the ‘threat’ of digital. I was worried that this session on the future of the novel would repeat some of the tired and ill-informed clichés I’d been hearing for years.
Lo and behold, it did.
Jacobson had already given his keynote speech on the future of the novel the previous morning, but I had missed the media coverage that the speech had received (TL;DR Jacobson argued that the novel wasn’t dead, the ‘problem’ was the modern reader) and so didn’t realise this was a conversation that was already bubbling under the surface of the festival. There were, thankfully, a handful of thoughtful and valuable comments during this event, particularly from James and Enright. When the panel was discussing the influence of digitization and the democratising effect it can have on literature, James noted that:
“one of the things that this digitization has done is, it has created a very, sort of, sheltered, wealthy, white boy New-York-writer talking about the death of the novel and the novel isn’t dead, we just don’t want to hear your stories anymore”
Jacobson, on the other hand, spent the hour lamenting that people (particularly young people) were not reading enough novels. He spoke anecdotally about how in school and university, students are not given whole novels to read, but passages or sections of longer works, so when they come to the point in their scholarly career when they need to read a “whole” novel in a short space of time they can’t, or don’t want to. He used the specific example of Oliver Twist, which, Jacobson argued, isn’t a very long book (it usually runs for around 300 pages which, for some readers, myself included, can seem a bit long). Jacobson might not think Oliver Twist is a very long book but it also wasn’t originally published as a novel. It was serialised in monthly instalments over two years from 1837–1839. This is an important example to highlight, and a slightly ironic one for Jacobson to use, since the thrust of Jacobson’s argument was that attention spans are diminishing and the nuance of the long-read - the peak of which is, apparently, the novel - is being lost. But, Oliver Twist, indeed, much of Dickens (who was frequently used as an example by the panel of a “great British novelist”), wasn’t originally presented to readers as a single, thick tome.
Ultimately, I came away from this discussion on the ‘future of the novel’ disappointed, confused and a little angry. I had listened to a discussion between Man Booker Prize winning and shortlisted authors and therefore, seemingly, ‘the best’ that the literature world has to offer (or at least those in the world eligible for the prize). Although it had promised to be a discussion that looked towards the future, it felt stale and outdated. There was a desperation to cling on to the novel as the pinnacle of literary accomplishment and value. And yet, when the panel were talking about the novel, what they were really talking about was a particular type of novel. At one point, Jacobson, bemoaning the UK publishing industry and its current fervour for “page-turners”, argued that he hated that his work, and the work of his fellow panellists, is called ‘literary fiction’. Jacobson suggested that this label was the kiss of death and put off readers who would never go into a bookshop and ask for “a really literary novel”. It seemed as though Jacobson thought genres should cease to exist: “A good detective novel doesn’t belong to the genre of the detective, it’s just fiction.” It was increasingly becoming clear that Jacobson viewed literature in terms of an (invisible) hierarchy and his ‘not literary’ literary fiction novels as being at the top. Who is at the bottom? “Other people who write odd little genres […] Let’s have them up in the bookshop, here are the bits and pieces, if you must, like children’s […] and S&M.”
What Jacobson had unwittingly done was articulate the attitude towards literature that the Man Booker Prize, as a cultural behemoth, fosters and perpetuates. The prize relies upon, indeed, was founded upon, a sense of elite prestige. The Prize’s website acknowledges this:
From the very beginning of what was originally called the Booker Prize there was just one criterion — the prize would be for “the best novel in the opinion of the judges”. […] The aim was to increase the reading of quality fiction and to attract “the intelligent general audience”.
Left unquestioned, these principles seem fair, noble even. In its essence, the prize wants to celebrate literature. How could that ever be a bad thing? It wants to bring the books the judges consider to be the best of the year to the attention of readers. All prizes and awards are, by their very nature, exclusionary — there has to be a loser for there to be a winner — so what’s wrong with the Man Booker?
The problem with the Man Booker Prize is the fact that it seems to be selective not just about the authors it celebrates, but about the kind of readers it wants. Judging by the prohibitively expensive festival tickets, the location of events (I’m yet to see a Man Booker event in the UK that is held outside of London) and the kind of approach to literature that the prize’s winners propagate — that there is ‘good’ reading (novels) and ‘bad’ reading (genre fiction and any form other than novels) — the Man Booker Prize is speaking to a select reader and audience. They’re wealthy, predominantly white, well-educated connoisseurs of high culture. This prize doesn’t want to bring literature into the hands of just anyone, it wants to maintain its self-engineered, self-congratulatory and self-perpetuating hierarchy of literary value. Rather than noble or fair, it is exclusionary, snobbish and classist. The Man Booker Prize doesn’t represent the best of literature, it represents the worst of pretension in literature.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been concerned about the motivations or rationale of the Man Booker Prize. I’ve written about its lack of diversity and how its rules of entry seem determined to push away small, independent publishers. Plus, I have voiced my concern about what the purpose of the ‘Golden Man Booker’ prize was. Elsewhere, Nicola Griffith has commented on the prize’s gender imbalance. The Prize’s headline sponsor, the Booker Group, also has a dark history of profiting from slave labour in Guyana. Even with all this, perhaps ill-advisedly, I was still trying to give the prize the benefit of the doubt. It seemed to do good work in increasing sales and visibility for books. I thought the past conversations about readability and the introduction of American writers (the criticisms of which I find perplexing and worrisome) were a sign that the prize was actually trying to be inclusive, broad and open-minded. But, after this weekend and seeing, and feeling, just how exclusionary, inequitable and navel gazing this prize really is, I’m done giving it the benefit of the doubt. The Man Booker Prize isn’t the bastion or saviour of great literature, it is harmful to reading and writing and books. It perpetuates outdated idealisms of what literature should be. And I’m done. The Man Booker does not have a monopoly on literature or culture, and it’s time we all stop acting like it does.
*I should note that I was lucky enough to acquire complimentary tickets for the events I attended. I would not have been able to afford to attend otherwise since the grand total of the tickets for events I attended would’ve been between £86 to £106 (not including booking transactions fees).
