Sewanee Review

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...