Has the Booker Prize been Americanised? The £50,000 prize which was opened up to American writers in 2014 has since won one of them a Booker — Paul Beatty last year with The Sellout — and has three U.S. novelists in the 2017 shortlist of six announced on Wednesday. If the British writers were feeling a bit let down you couldn’t blame them — the bookmakers definitely were stumped — as the American literary world has two top prizes, The Pulitzer and the National Book Award, which are celebrated worldwide.
The American contenders
But first, what did the shortlisted American writers bring to the table? Literary heavyweight Paul Auster’s first novel in seven years, 4321 , published this January, offers four parallel lives for one person. When short story writer George Saunders decided to write his debut novel, he turned to Abraham Lincoln to tell the story of the night the great American President lays his young deceased son to rest. Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo , an early favourite of bookmakers, was called a “masterpiece” by Zadie Smith whose Swing Time failed to make the final list. Emily Fridlund’s History of Wolves is about a disturbing time in the life of an adolescent as she takes care of a young boy in the Minnesota woods. A surprise omission was that of their fellow American Colson Whitehead, even as critics wondered if the fact that he has already won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his escape-from-slavery book The Underground Railroad played a part.
A veteran and a novice
Of the two British writers, there’s a veteran, Ali Smith — this is the fourth time she is being nominated — with her post-Brexit examination of society in Autumn , and a debut novelist, Fiona Mozley, who also happens to be the youngest on the list. The 29-year-old bookseller in York wrote her novel, Elmet , about a family living on the margins as she commuted from London to York.
Closer home, there was both sadness and joy with Arundhati Roy ’ s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fires losing out, but Mohsin Hamid ’s Exit West being picked for his story on migration and its aftermath, of two lovers seeking to flee a city in the throes of war. The head of the judging panel, Baroness Lola Young, said the six “unique and intrepid books collectively push against the borders of convention” and that they are “playful, sincere, unsettling, fierce... grown from tradition but also radical and contemporary”. She could well be talking about the books that have been left out. We could make up a parallel list with the writers who aren’t in the shortlist, Roy, Smith, Shamsie, Sebastian Barry et al, and lose nothing in quality. Now to October 17, Booker Prize day.
