Show caption The 2004 Man Booker prize ceremony, the year the award was won by Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Photograph: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images Booker prize Has the Booker prize lost its mojo? Rows, gaffes and disdainful speeches – the Booker prize has always been in the news. But now, a creeping sense of bad decision-making is undermining its cachet Rachel Cooke @msrachelcooke Sun 7 Oct 2018 03.00 EDT Share on Facebook

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Documentaries about contemporary writers do not tend to liveliness – which is, perhaps, one reason why the BBC is increasingly reluctant to commission them. But Barneys, Books and Bust-ups: 50 Years of the Booker prize, to be screened on BBC Four on 15 October, the night before the announcement of this year’s winner, could not be boring even if it tried. There are no vengeful former muses; on this score, even Salman Rushdie gets off scot-free. But those who live in fear of lingering shots of honeyed bookshelves and the scratchy sound of a fountain pen moving across a sheet of paper can relax. Fifty years is a long time when it comes to gossip, feuds, giant egos, rank stupidity and mild lunacy, all of which the Booker prize used to deliver on a pretty regular basis. The film’s director, Jon Morrice, could have used no new material whatsoever, and he would still have had more footage than he knew what to do with.

Every moment bulges with incident; every anecdote involves cattiness, hubris or the plangent lessons offered by posterity (occasionally, all three). Hard to say what I enjoyed most. Was it the sight of a sweaty Anthony Burgess, shortlisted for Earthly Powers in 1980, describing the Booker as “a rather small, parochial prize suitable for rather small, parochial writers”? (Burgess, sulking in a hotel while everyone else attended the ceremony, by this point knew very well that William Golding had bagged it for Rites of Passage.) Or was it when John Banville, the winner in 2005 for The Sea, smoothly announced on his big night that it was at least “nice to see a work of art winning the prize”? At the end of the hour, the viewer can only conclude that a kind of madness is apt to descend on those who get involved with the Booker, be they writers, publishers, judges or critics.

Still, for all the madness and hype, the prize at least used to lead readers to books, sometimes in their millions. In Sheffield, in the 80s, my father would buy the shortlist every year as a matter of course, which is how he discovered such writers as William Boyd and Graham Swift. It is hard to imagine him doing so now. By general consent, its old shine is fast disappearing. “I think there has been a diminishment of the brand, one I would place at the feet of the last few winners,” says one former senior bookseller who, like almost everyone I approached about this piece, would talk only off the record. “The shortlist no longer has the power it had in terms of sales. It has stopped being a reliable indicator so far as readers go, and the fact that Colson Whitehead’s [Pulitzer prize-winning] The Underground Railroad wasn’t on the longlist last year, and that Sally Rooney’s Normal People hasn’t made it to the shortlist this year, are just other instances of that.”

The last time the public connected with the prize? 2012’s shortlisted authors (l-r) Deborah Levy, Tan Twan Eng, Hilary Mantel, Will Self, Alison Moore and Jeet Thayil. Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters

Is he saying that, for the public, it has lost its lustre? “Yes, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. The last book that connected with readers was Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies [in 2012]. It’s less the Oscars now, and more the Cannes film festival.” So who does he predict will triumph this year? “If I were still a bookseller, the book I would want to win is Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black [an adventure story about a runaway slave]. It’s such an enjoyable read. But the book I think will win is The Overstory by Richard Powers.” In case you don’t know – I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s read it – The Overstory is an idiosyncratic and, in the words of one plucky critic, “valiant” 500-page epic that is supposed to do for trees what Moby-Dick did for whales. Perhaps this is why my contact is laughing.

In certain quarters, of course, Powers would be an unpopular choice not only for commercial reasons. “American wins Booker prize for the third year running” isn’t, most insiders feel, a headline its director and trustees would want to see in the award’s 50th year. Publishers’ and authors’ nerves aside, in 2018, a more than usually large cloud of anxiety looms over the Booker and all who sail in her. The Man Group, the prize’s sponsor since 2002, is signed up only until 2020, and the word is that Luke Ellis, its CEO, is somewhat less keen on the company’s £1.6m annual commitment to both it and the International Man Booker prize than his predecessor. Given the well-publicised withdrawal of other sponsors from book prizes in recent years, no one is taking anything for granted. Meanwhile, publishers and booksellers alike agree that this year’s longlist was, for whatever reason, distinctly weird, with its inclusion of both a comic book (Sabrina by Nick Drnaso) and a crime novel (Snap by Belinda Bauer). “Next year, they’re going to get 30 crime novels,” says one confused publisher. “One of the criteria for entry is that you must publish two literary novels a year, and if a crime novel is now a literary novel, more imprints are going to believe they’ve eligible books on their lists.”

This, in turn, could bring the prize’s organisers yet more woe. Anecdotally, it’s getting ever harder to find willing Booker judges, largely because the task is so onerous (this year, the judges read 171 novels). At least one high-profile writer who was approached to chair the judges in its birthday year said no. There are even niggling anxieties about the ceremony itself, a grand dinner that is held in the Guildhall, in the City of London, and attended by the Duchess of Cornwall. Last year, most of the invited journalists seemed to have been seated together, far away from any authors, publishers or random celebrities, a move that seemed to many a kind of insult given that publicity, good or bad, continues to be the Booker’s most vigorous engine.

Above all, the majority of publishers and many writers and agents remain furious at the trustees’ decision, five years ago, to throw open the prize to any book written in English that is published in Britain – which was a roundabout way of saying that US writers would henceforth be allowed to enter (previously, only novels by Commonwealth and Irish writers were eligible). At an event marking the 50th birthday at the Southbank Centre last July, Peter Carey, who has won the Booker twice, called it an exercise in corporate branding that made no sense to literature; American prizes, he noted, are not open to writers from Australia or Britain. Julian Barnes, another former winner, described the decision as “daft”, pointing out that three of the six shortlisted writers in 2017 were American. Had one of these elbowed out, say, a fine Zimbabwean novel?

Kingsley Amis reacts to the announcement that he has won the 1985 Booker prize at the Guildhall, London. Photograph: PA/PA Archive

With only one exception, everyone I speak to feels the same: that something has been lost. “A big, big mistake,” says Carmen Callil, co-founder of Virago books and former managing director of Chatto & Windus. “Its USP has gone,” says a leading agent (this despite the fact that he represents some US authors). “This whole fucking thing about us having such a cultural cringe towards America,” says one publisher. In his view, it is now all but impossible for certain kinds of novel to succeed at the Booker (in four years of being eligible, two Americans have won it, while nine out of a possible 24 authors, have been shortlisted). “The judges seem to favour big, noble, American failures over smaller, quieter, non-American masterpieces.” Another publisher agrees: “It’s hard to imagine, say, an Alan Hollinghurst winning in this landscape.”

The irony is that the Booker, according to some of these same people, is now losing ground in the US. “American publishers loved the fact that it brought them writers from other territories,” says one. “They don’t need to be told about Anne Tyler or Paul Auster. They know about them already.” Just to add to the angst, some American agents now reportedly make entry to the Booker prize a condition of the sale of the work of a US author to a British publisher. Given that publishers are allowed only two entries for each imprint (plus the novels of previously shortlisted authors), this would, if true, contribute to a further pushing out of British and Commonwealth writers.Last February, Mark Richards, the publisher at John Murray, and Alex Bowler, then at Granta and now at Faber & Faber, drew up a letter asking the Booker trustees to reconsider their decision; it was signed by 30 publishers, and quietly supported by at least 10 more. The letter warned of a “homogenised literary future” permanently dominated by American writers. Some weeks later, the trustees and the prize’s literary director, Gaby Wood, invited its signatories to a meeting. “It was a bit fractious,” says one publisher who attended. Another admits: “It was, perhaps, a little over-emotional. People talked of authors having been betrayed.” Alexandra Pringle, who runs Bloomsbury, which published George Saunders, the American who won the 2017 prize, spoke passionately of how “a small, Cumbrian writer” would struggle for notice in this new realm. What was the attitude of Wood and the other trustees who attended to this? They were “defensive”. Why were the publishers talking of the prize’s “duty” to authors? It has no duty. Its role is only to reward the best book. If they didn’t like it, they were more than welcome to set up their own prize.

Some time after this, a second meeting was held between a smaller number of publishers, Wood and Helena Kennedy, the chair of the trustees. This was more conciliatory, though nothing really changed. “I can’t think of a single publisher who thinks it’s a good idea,” says one trade journalist. “But they’re resigned to it now.” Others are more optimistic: “My hope is that 2020, when Man’s sponsorship comes up for renewal, will provide the obvious moment for a rule change. I get the feeling that some trustees, if not all, are persuadable.” On the committee that advises the board of trustees about such matters – it comprises publishers, agents and critics, as well as, currently, James Daunt, the managing director of Waterstones, and Jonty Claypole, head of arts at the BBC – opinions are mixed. “I don’t think the decision should be reversed,” says one member. “I think that ship has sailed. But I know there are others who disagree.”

John Banville, the 2005 Booker winner for The Sea, said during his acceptance speech that it was ‘nice to see a work of art winning the prize’. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Where did the decision to include US writers originate? Publishers like to blame the Man Group, and what they regard as its greedy lust for global publicity. But according to one Booker insider, this is not the case. For two years, the trustees looked at the possibility of setting up a new, separate prize in the US; the consultants McKinsey were commissioned to explore this. When it became clear that it wouldn’t be feasible, Peter Mayer, the American former publisher of Penguin Books, and Ed Victor, the London-based American literary agent, suggested the change (both men have since died, as has Ion Trewin, then the literary director of the prize). Ask the Man Group, an investment management company, what it gets out of sponsoring the prize, and the talk is mostly of corporate social responsibility (the Booker prize foundation works in schools and libraries and supports a number of literacy programmes) and the “unique social networking opportunities” it provides for clients (among other things, it takes 200 seats at the award ceremony).

However, a spokesperson also tells me that the company regards it as a “brand that we own because we have our name on it”. Is the name Man Booker better known – more written and talked about – in the US since American writers became eligible? It is difficult to say. However, it is worth noting that the percentage rise in sales of books in the US for winners from outside the country dwarfs that of American winners (while Paul Beatty, the American who won in 2016 for The Sellout, only doubled his US sales, Eleanor Catton, the New Zealander whose novel The Luminaries won in 2013, multiplied hers tenfold).

To some, of course, all this is just a squall in an inkwell. As Professor John Carey puts it in the BBC’s film, Booker titles seem to many to conform ever more strongly to the bien-pensant tastes of a small, urban coterie, a world so far removed from most bookshelves as to be almost absurd (one thinks of Edward St Aubyn’s 2014 novel Lost for Words, a satire about a prize very like the Booker, in which there appears a judge who is obsessed only with relevance and “consensus-building” and a novelist who writes “like a man walking backwards along a path, erasing his footsteps with a broom”). But while there may be truth in this, if you are of a certain age, and love novels, and didn’t grow up in a family with, say, a subscription to the Times Literary Supplement, it’s impossible not to care about its future. I remember so clearly the first time I saw the winner announced on the BBC: it was Kingsley Amis in 1986, for The Old Devils, who said, eyes popping, that he would spend the prize money on “booze, of course, and curtains”, words I’ve never forgotten. As a teenager, the Booker introduced me to Penelope Lively and Timothy Mo. As a student, it brought me to AS Byatt and Banville. Later on, I read Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love and Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man – beloved books, both – for no other reason at all than because they were on the shortlist.

Salman Rushdie, the only triple Booker winner. He is pictured in 1993, when he won the ‘Booker of Bookers’ award for his 1981 Winner Midnight’s Children. The novel also won the 2008 Best of the Booker prize in a public vote. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA

I would love it to seem glamorous and vital again: as widely and passionately talked about as it was in the 80s and 90s. But maybe we’ve simply come, down the years, to expect too much of it. “It’s just one literary prize,” a member of the advisory committee tells me. “Yet expectations of it are totally unrealistic.” People think that it has changed, he says, when really it’s only the world in which it operates that has: “No prize could have the same place as it once did in a culture that is so noisy. Maybe that’s the real reason quieter, more domestic books are losing out; they make less impact anyway.”

Or perhaps it has just become too slick, too professional, too boringly 21st century. Last year, hunkered in a corner with my fellow hacks, I looked out across the Guildhall at the massed ranks of sober-seeming guests (no wonder there are fewer punch-ups these days), so many of whose heads were bowed prayerfully over their mobile phones, and thought of Selina Scott’s famous faux pas when she stuck her microphone in the face of Fay Weldon, the chair of the judges in 1983, and asked if she really had read all the books. (This after she had already failed to recognise another judge, Angela Carter.) If I had seen Morrice’s film, I might also have pictured the distinguished biographer Hermione Lee phoning Keri Hulme, the pipe-smoking New Zealander who won for The Bone People in 1985, live from her table at the award dinner to ask how she was feeling (technology being what it was then, we could hear, but not see, the startled author shout the words: “Bloody hell!”). These things, and so many others, would never happen now – and perhaps we’re all the poorer for it.