• On The 2020 Booker Prize
• Tara k. Menon (bio)

The Booker Prize shortlist this year is unprecedented: four of the six novels are debuts, the majority are by women, and half are by Black authors. No straight white men. Nobody is English. (Douglas Stuart, the only British author on the list, was born and raised in Scotland.) By most measures, it is the most diverse shortlist in the history of the prize. [End Page 131] Depending on who you are, it is either a welcome surprise or pandering to the scourge of political correctness.

Even for conservative British cultural critics, it's a little difficult today to come out and say that the shortlist is too Black or too female, so their loudest complaints have been that it's too American. Since a rule change in 2014, the British literary establishment has been up in arms about the inclusion of Americans. In 2018, a group of British writers tried, unsuccessfully, to change the rules back. There have been portents of the change—two Americans have now won the Prize; Paul Beatty in 2016, George Saunders in 2017—but this year, the doomsday predictions have been fully realized. Only a single author—the Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga—doesn't hold an American passport. (Stuart has dual citizenship.) The Times lamented that the Booker Prize was now "more interested in launching new voices or amplifying writers from backgrounds far from its Hampstead reputation." The Telegraph cut to the chase: "The Booker Prize has abandoned Britain," a headline decried.

Poor little Britain.

Let me lay my cards on the table: I count myself among those frustrated by the inclusion of Americans. But unlike the aggrieved English cultural elite who feel they need protection from the Americans (let's not dwell on that irony), I am not despondent about, say, The Mirror and the Light, the sprawling final volume of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy, not making the shortlist. (The first two books—Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies—both won the Booker. Before the shortlist was announced, The Mirror and the Light was the heavy favorite of critics and bookies alike. For what it's worth, Mantel called her exclusion "disappointing on one level" but also "quite freeing.") My grievance is different: the fact is Americans writers are often backed by the heavyweights of the publishing industry, and now that they have entered the race, many non-British writers of English fiction may never be shortlisted. [End Page 132]

As an Indian girl attending international schools in Singapore, I hadn't heard about the National Book Award and was only vaguely aware of the Pulitzer, but I knew who won the Booker Prize every year. I even knew who was on the shortlist. It made the papers; my parents discussed it at dinner. For a young avid reader, the Booker list was a place of discovery. More importantly, it was an antidote to the hyper-canon I was force-fed at school: Shakespeare, Shelley, Austen, the Brontës, Hardy. I loved all those books; I still do. But the Booker introduced me to worlds and writers I didn't get in the classroom—Arundhati Roy, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Ben Okri.

The glory of the Booker Prize was never that it was the best of the British but that it introduced the world to brilliant writers from countries formerly colonized by them. (I don't have much patience for the word "Commonwealth," the still widely used euphemism to describe nations plundered by the British.) With accepted authority, the Prize committee declared these novelists the best in the world. At its best, the Booker redistributes literary prestige: not only has the metropole lost its territories, it can also no longer...

• 2020年布克奖
• 塔拉k。梅农（生物）

今年的布克奖入围名单是史无前例的：六本小说中有四本是处女作，大多数是女性，一半是黑人作家。没有直的白人。没有人是英语。（榜单上唯一的英国作家道格拉斯·斯图尔特（Douglas Stuart）在苏格兰出生和长大。）从大多数方面看，它是该奖项历史上种类最多的入围名单。[结束第131页]根据您的身份，这是令人欢迎的惊喜，还是顺应政治正确性的祸害。

即使对于保守的英国文化评论家来说，今天也很难说出入围名单是黑人还是女性，所以他们最响亮的抱怨是它太美国人了。自2014年规则发生变化以来，英国文学机构对美国人的加入抱有很大的热情。2018年，一群英国作家试图将规则改回失败，但未成功。发生了这种变化的预兆–两名美国人现在赢得了该奖项。保罗·比蒂（Paul Beatty）在2016年，乔治·桑德斯（George Saunders）在2017年-但今年，世界末日的预言已经完全实现。津巴布韦的齐齐·丹加伦布（Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga）只有一个作者没有美国护照。（斯图尔特具有双重国籍。）泰晤士报感叹布克奖现在“对发动新声音或扩大来自汉普斯特德声誉远的背景的作家更感兴趣”。头条新闻谴责电报：“布克奖已经抛弃了英国”。

可怜的小英国。

让我将牌放在桌子上：我把自己列为那些因美国人的加入而感到沮丧的人。但是，与感到受屈的英国文化精英不同，他们认为他们需要得到美国人的保护（让我们不要再讽刺了），我对《镜与光》（希拉里·曼特尔的《托马斯·克伦威尔》三部曲）的发行量并不失望，入围名单。（前两本书-沃尔夫·霍尔（Wolf Hall）和育种机构（Bring up the Bodies）都赢得了布克奖。在宣布入围名单之前，《镜与光》（The Mirror and the Light是评论家和博彩公司的最爱。曼特尔（Mantel）称自己的排斥表现“一方面令人失望”，但也“相当自由”。）我的不满是不同的：事实是，美国作家经常受到出版业重量级人物的支持，而现在他们已经进入了出版业。在比赛中，许多非英国英语小说作家可能永远不会入围。[结束页132]

作为在新加坡的国际学校上学的印度女孩，我没有听说过全国图书奖，只是模糊地意识到了普立兹奖，但我知道每年谁赢得了布克奖。我什至知道谁在候选名单上。它制作了文件；我的父母在晚餐时讨论了这个问题。对于一个年轻的狂热读者来说，布克清单是一个发现的地方。更重要的是，它是我在学校被强迫喂食的超级佳能的解药：莎士比亚，雪莱，奥斯丁，布伦特，哈代。我喜欢所有那些书。我仍然。但是，布克将我介绍给了我在教室里没遇到的世界和作家-阿伦达蒂·罗伊（Arundhati Roy），纳丁·戈迪默（Nadine Gordimer），萨尔曼·拉什迪（Salman Rushdie），迈克尔·昂达特（Michael Ondaatje），JM库切（JM Coetzee），彼得·凯里（Peter Carey），本·奥克里（Ben Okri）。

布克奖的荣耀从来不是它是英国最好的，而是它把世界介绍给了来自曾被他们殖民的国家的杰出作家。（我对使用仍然被广泛使用的委婉语来描述被英国掠夺的国家的“英联邦”一词并没有太大的耐心。）在获得公认的权威下，奖赏委员会宣布这些小说家为世界上最好的小说家。布克充其量只能重新分配文学声望：不仅大都市失去了领地，它也不再能够...