Today’s Daily Telegraph has an article captioned Man Booker rule change has lost us sales , say publishes, and the caption reads: US dominance has hit Commonwealth writers who are falling off shortlists.  

Not that my opinion had an iota of influence, I was opposed to the rule change in 2014, which opened the prize to writers from any nationality, who publish in English, on the basis that there are a large number of US literary prizes, so there was no need to open another prize to American writers.  I also felt that the Man Booker was a unique prize open to Commonwealth authors.  Finally, given the quirky judging standards of the Man Booker Prize Committer (see my most recent post), it seemed inappropriate to me that the Booker should be positioning itself as the top global prize in English literature.

Now the publishers have weighed in with their own arguments regarding the effect of the rule change on the volume of books sold, and, by extension, on their bottom lines.

“About 30 publishers are understood to have signed a letter urging the trustees to the Booker Prize Foundation to reverse the decision, saying the change risked creating ‘a homogenised literary future’ dominated by American culture.  ‘The rule change, which presumably had the intention of making the prize more global, has in fact made it less so by allowing the dominance of Anglo-American writers at the expense of others; it risks turning the prize, once 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’ it says.

“It claims that diversity of the prize has been ‘significantly reduced’, noting that this year’s shortlist consists of three Americans, two Britons, and one British-Pakistani as opposed to 2013’s shortlist which featured a New Zealander, a Zimbabwean, an Irishman, an American-Canadian and a British-American. ‘We already live in a world that is dominated by American culture’, the letter says. ‘The Man Booker Prize was one significant way to allow other voices to be heard.’

“Johnny Geller, of the Curtis Brown literary agency, said the letter was ‘a long time coming’ and that ‘widening the entry requirements to include US writers has resulted in weakened sales on both sides of the Atlantic’.

“Denying that diversity had been reduced, the Booker foundation said the rule change was not created specifically to included US writers but to allow entries from authors of any nationality, regardless of geography.”

Clearly, the rule change has reduced diversity, and one is prompted to ask why the rule change was felt to be necessary: was it to raise the profile of the foundation at the expense of sacrificing its unique position?

The point about the impact on sales is interesting, and the article does not mention whether it was addressed in the foundation’s response.  Presumably, the cause of this sales decline is that Man Booker prize recognition does little to increase the sales of winning American authors: they already have recognition through other awards and bestseller lists.  But, non-recognition of Commonwealth authors impacts their sales on both sides of the Atlantic.

It will be interesting to see how much power the publishers have in this situation!