The Man Booker Prize is Great Britain’s most prestigious literary award. It is conferred annually on a novel, written and published in English, and guarantees a considerable boost in sales plus global fame (and about $70,000 in cash) for the novelist. In the United Kingdom, and in various parts of the English-speaking world, each season’s “short list” of finalists is received with something like the same anticipation and media coverage as the Academy Award nominations here in America.
Originally called the Booker-McConnell Prize when it began 50 years ago, it has changed its name a couple of times to reflect the identity of its sponsors and been known as Man Booker since 2002. The Man Group is an investment firm; Booker-McConnell Ltd. is Britain’s largest food wholesaler.
We mention these details as background to a controversy now roiling the Man Booker Prize. Eligibility was originally limited to authors in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the British Commonwealth, but the rules were amended in 2014 to include novelists who write in English and are published in the UK and Commonwealth. That meant that American writers were now eligible for the Man Booker—and indeed two Americans won the prize: Paul Beatty in 2016, George Saunders in 2017.
This development has not gone over well with British publishing companies, 30 of whom have written a letter of complaint to the Booker Prize Foundation. Their bill of particulars will be familiar to students of modern grievance—the rules change will lead to American dominance and decrease “diversity” among finalists and winners—but is revealing as well: The Man Booker Prize has been transformed from “a brilliant mechanism for bringing the world’s English-language writers to the attention of the world’s biggest English-language market into one that is no longer serving the readers in that market.”
Translation: Letting Americans in the door has damaged sales.
Of course, the “diversity” complaint is self-evidently ludicrous: If anything, the inclusion of American novelists will broaden diversity rather than restrict it. But the main point is whether the new Man Booker rules are good for (British) business, and the publishers’ letter nicely sums up our generally cynical view of prizes, awards, citations, and honors, especially in the arts. That is, they have little or nothing to do with artistic merit and much to do with politics and commerce.
This applies to everything from the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Oscar for Best Picture to the Kennedy Center Honors, and surely includes such problematic distinctions as honorary degrees—almost always subject to political appraisal—and TIME’s Person of the Year, a brilliant innovation in commercial self-promotion.
To be sure, it’s fun to speculate about which choreographer of what sex will be honored by the Kennedy Center, or what continent deserves to claim the Nobel Prize this year, or how many players of which race will be nominated for Best Supporting Actor. But let’s not kid ourselves about whether these are issues of quality and distinction. Like the Man Booker Prize, these are commercial enterprises dressed in cultural costumes with strong political overtones. But sometimes, as those 30 British publishers have shown, the stakes are so high that the disguise must be briefly discarded.
