James Wood is a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker and a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University.

It’s important to understand what the so-called "internationalization" of the Booker Prize means in actual terms. It doesn’t really mean internationalization, but Americanization.

This decision has nothing to do with literature. Rather it's a way to get a bigger audience, more sales, more attention and money.

Practically speaking, when you open up an English language fiction prize that was already open to Britain and its former colonies (Australia and New Zealand, Canada, India, parts of Africa, parts of the Caribbean), you open it up only to … America. And practically speaking, because America is so large, has so many hugely talented and major novelists, and has such a prosperous fiction-making infrastructure (I mean the creative writing school system), Americans will dominate any future Booker Prize.

I understand that in a globalized world, it makes increasing sense to think of the Anglophone novel as a global form. And the novel has always been international -- ever since Fielding borrowed from Cervantes, and Pushkin from Richardson.

But the Booker Prize retained a distinctive identity by essentially excluding America. That is the cold truth of it. This exclusion wasn’t as arbitrary as it might seem: it meant that light was shed on certain traditions (the British novel, the Indian novel written in English, Australian fiction, writing in South Africa, and so on) that don’t have much -- if anything -- to do with the great American traditions. Several important writers -- Rushdie, Coetzee, Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje -- were illuminated in this way.

The organizers will say that this is a literary decision (and will talk the talk about "the global Anglophone novel"), but this is just a financial and marketing decision, and nothing more -- a bigger audience, more sales, more attention and money. It has nothing to do with literature. (Perhaps it never had much to do with literature: which is why some of us intensely dislike the whole burgeoning culture of "prizes.")

And there is something politically craven about the decision, too: it’s not as if the Pulitzer or National Book Award is opening itself up to all fiction written in English. But those American prizes retain a distinct identity, while the Booker loses its.

On the other hand, as William Gass once wrote, a quick look at the forgotten mediocrities who have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is a sobering lesson in the relative unimportance of literary prizes. So perhaps there should not be too much lamentation anyway.