Women "dominate" the Bookers

The rules were changed in 2014 to include Americans. That was, and is, controversial but is unlikely to be changed now.

I read that there was one British contender - the lady who won.
most are Americans -but American competitions don’t allow Brits.

@Halfemptyhalfling the Booker Prize is open to all books written in English (it used to be Commonwealth, now includes the US) not just books written in the UK. So if you include the population of all English speaking countries then your proportionate racial makeup would be different to what you are suggesting. Over half would be from the Indian subcontinent and most of the rest would be African with a token white writer.

Unlike @Dappy777 I don't believe that dead white men wrote better books than anyone else so am quite chilled about literary prizes drawing attention to writers from different backgrounds that don't necessarily get a lot of attention otherwise.

And we all know that the writing that lasts isn't necessarily the most popular when it's written. Compare Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. Although to be fair to Walter Scott he did, unlike most of his contemporaries, recognise that Jane Austen was a great writer. Most of them dismissed her as a woman writer writing parochial books for women.

I think they should reflect the UK population and aim to have 50:50 gender , if there are 10 shortlisted: 1 or 2 ethnic minority authors, one from Scotland and Northern Ireland/Wales alternating years. Also only one who attended a private school and at least one or two with a disadvantaged childhood eg free school meals. Only one or two openly gay. This should help make the book selections more relevant to general population.

They should make it more inclusive and open the prize up to people who don’t read and can’t write books. They should win and the guardian should write an article about it.

No.

But that's a political view, not a literary one.

Although I suppose that as the Booker is no longer a literary prize, you're in line with its thinking.

I used to follow it avidly, buy all the shortlisted books but now I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. The shortlist has to tick several boxes and very few of them are to do with the book's worth.

I follow other prizes like the Baillie Gifford, the Walter Scott, The Portico and Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime.

Well it should be. They should be ruthlessly honest and judge each book purely on merit. I ignore the Booker Prize now. In fact, I pretty much ignore contemporary fiction. The literary establishment has completely lost my trust. Harold Bloom warned about this years ago, but no one listened.

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital has won!

Presumably not this year.

You're spectacularly missing the point.

Sorry correcting myself - there was 1 woman and 5 men on the 2023 shortlist.

Well one wonders for how many years white men dominated it, completely unremarked und un-newsworthy.

im glad they're getting a taste of how it feels to be overlooked to be honest

There's a lot of attention around this this year. The comments section of The Times was full of outraged men. Weirdly none of them seemed to bothered last year when there were 5 men (including 3 Pauls) and no women on the shortlist.

I think it's a bit of an odd list this year with some real marmite books - Held and Orbital particularly divisive - but other than My Friends, there weren't any standouts from the longlist that I thought should make it (I've only read 5). I really liked The Safe Keep.

It'll be interesting to see if the sole man ends up winning it - he's also the favourite.

I don't believe so, no. I don't know if the Booker has ever really been about merit. They seem to like to choose controversial titles to stir up controversy. For many years their lists were mostly men which is why the Orange prize started, because the whole shortlist was male.

We aren't going to agree so let's leave it there.

So all the books there are 100% on their own merit and worthy books in their own right?

You’re misunderstanding me. If there is no possibility of judging the entire long list blind, which there isn’t, there’s no value in the tokenism of sending out MS without identifying information. It isn’t going to put the already established authors, who are immediately identifiable to anyone who is relatively well-informed about contemporary fiction, regardless of the presence of a name/title, on the same footing as the debuts.

Blind auditioning musicians to fill an orchestra seat works because even if you know exactly who is likely to be auditioning, you are prevented from identifying them while they are actually playing behind a screen.

No musician seeking an orchestra seat is going to produce such an idiosyncratic interpretation of the audition piece that they going to be readily identifiable, whereas presenting ‘blind’ numbered MS would simply mean the judges talked about Manuscript 87, the Ali Smith, Manuscript 124, the Hilary Mantel and the Anne Enright.

Plus the ‘blind’ lasts only a few minutes for an orchestra panel, rather than the six or seven months taken for a list of 160 or so novels to be turned into a shortlist.

I totally agree with you @poppyzbrite4 - it is the literal case in musical arts. No reason why the same rules cannot be applied in literature and the early stages will be entry via publishers/agents anyway, as they are now!

Fun fact: my old university professor was the chair the year Life of Pi won. Didn’t surprise me at all as Lisa Jardine was always fairly avant garde in her approach to everything!

I'd out myself!

No, I'm not suggesting that some members of the panel won't recognise a book. It's a possibility they will. However, it's unlikely all the panelists will recognise the book, some may not and the person who knows the author obviously has to justify their choice with the other panelists.

It's extremely unlikely that all the panelists will recognise the majority of authors in the longlist.

Musicians are judged blind when they are auditioned for orchestras. They play behind a panel so the judges don't know their sex or ethnicity.

Look, no one is suggesting all judges are going to recognise all longlisted novels. Of course they wouldn’t.

But your suggestion up the thread that judges given manuscripts without author names so that they judge blind, purely on ‘good writing’, is just not workable.

The prominent authors on the shortlist, if not immediately recognisable to a reading judge because of their style/subject matter, are going to be reviewed, advertised, discussed on arts programmes, piled up prominently in bookstores, and their authors will be appearing at literary festivals etc etc. A big debut likewise. If you are a judge, you will inevitably be able to identify some novels, whether because you know the author’s work already, or because you knew Colm Toibin was writing a sequel to Brooklyn, or you saw a review in the Guardian of a debut novel about an Australian who falls in love with the headmaster’s wife at an English boarding school, and lo and behold, your unnamed manuscript is about an Australian falling in love with a headmaster’s wife etc.

There’s no way of judging blind.