Opening the prize up to American authors could end a tradition of bringing brilliant post-colonial writing to a global audience
And the winner of the 2014 Man Booker prize for Fiction is … American. Or perhaps not. The odds for this week’s award are against Joshua Ferris, whose To Rise Again at a Decent Hour ingeniously pits a dentist against the internet, and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which is emotive, philosophical, and the only shortlisted novel not published by Penguin Random House.
But one of the reasons prizes are such fun is that bookies can only guess what judges think. They were wrong about this week’s Nobel literature prize winner Patrick Modiano. Favourites – in Man Booker’s case The Lives of Others by Indian-born Londoner Neel Mukherjee – are often disappointed. To me the futuristic J, by former winner Howard Jacobson, looks like the outsider.
This is the first year Americans have been allowed to enter Britain’s richest writing contest. So it’s the first time fiction fans have faced the prospect of an American – rather than one of three Brits or the Australian nominated – triumphing at London’s Guildhall on Tuesday, and flying home with £50,000. How do we feel about this?
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But one of the reasons prizes are such fun is that bookies can only guess what judges think. They were wrong about this week’s Nobel literature prize winner Patrick Modiano. Favourites – in Man Booker’s case The Lives of Others by Indian-born Londoner Neel Mukherjee – are often disappointed. To me the futuristic J, by former winner Howard Jacobson, looks like the outsider.
This is the first year Americans have been allowed to enter Britain’s richest writing contest. So it’s the first time fiction fans have faced the prospect of an American – rather than one of three Brits or the Australian nominated – triumphing at London’s Guildhall on Tuesday, and flying home with £50,000. How do we feel about this?
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