Sowing the seeds of success … 2012 Booker
prize judges plant trees at the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Wood in
Leicestershire
Last week I received a
welcome reminder from the people who run the Booker prize of their
commitment to the environment – a photograph of some recent Booker judges in
wellington boots, planting trees.
Of course, this was not
just about promoting green shoots and leaves. As spring heaves into view, the
annual literary prize season opens again. It will run, roughly, from Easter to
Halloween. During that time, Booker will want to assert itself as the premier
book prize in the English-speaking world. No stone (or sod) will remain unturned
in the ceaseless business of reminding the media and the reading public about
Man Booker. The same goes for Costa, Samuel Johnson,
the book prize formerly known as Orange, and many lesser awards.
Booker's tree-planting
stunt is also a reminder that these trophies are big business. Costa fights the
coffee shop war against Starbucks with volumes of poetry, first novels and kids'
books. The Man Group extracts vital publicity for itself from the year's best
literary fiction. Who, outside the
Square Mile, had ever heard of the Man Group before it became the Booker
sponsor?
It's big business for
writers, too. Win
the Booker prize and you become a millionaire. Win the top Costa slot (that
one is a bit more complicated) and, like Kate
Atkinson or Mark Haddon, your literary
course is set fair. (Not necessarily a good thing, but indisputable
nonetheless.)
Another reason the Booker judges travelled to the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Wood (QEDJW), in Leicestershire, to plant trees with the Woodland Trust is that this season is going to see a uniquely fierce battle for supremacy (and column inches) among the big beasts of the literary prize jungle.
Not only is the former
Orange prize going it alone for a year as the Women's prize for fiction,
announcing its longlist on Wednesday, but there is soon to be some stern
competition from a new book award, the Literature prize, which will
announce its sponsor at the British Museum on 13 March.
The Literature prize has all the characteristics of an event conceived in the post-millennial book world. It is well-funded (to the tune of approximately £250,000). It has already been well-promoted to the media, and has made a point of securing as much advance support as possible from London's literary community.
In short, it reflects a
literary culture where prizes, as much as reviews, make the running, and where
big prizes become themselves a cultural event of unprecedented consequence. You
have only to watch the fate
of Hilary Mantel (post-Booker and post-Costa) to see the impact of
prize-winning on one blameless writer unfamiliar with the rules of life in the
spotlight.
But never mind Ms Mantel. What Man Booker and, to a lesser extent, Costa will be really worried about with the Literature prize is its breathtaking ambition. In other words, its reach: it is global, treating the English language, for the first time, as a creative lingua franca as well as a commercial one.
I'm told by Andrew Kidd, the prime mover of the new prize, that the forthcoming London launch will be followed by events in Ireland, Australia, New York and Canada. From that list, it's the US dimension that makes this prize a real contender.
Booker and Costa (formerly
Whitbread), founded in the 1960s and 70s respectively, are creatures of their
time. Both focus on novels from Britain and the Commonwealth, and exclude the
USA. Neither has any connection with, or understanding of, the literary energies
of the global English language in, for example, the Middle East, China or the
Pacific. Similarly, across the Atlantic, all the top US prizes – Pulitzer, National Book
awards and the National
Book Critics' Circle – celebrate American literary achievement.
Fiction in the English language has now slipped the surly bonds of Hampstead, Manhattan and the mid-west. English-language fiction, for better and worse, is becoming increasingly global, with booming markets in places previously overlooked by English and American publishers. This new prize is surfing a wave that could carry it a very long way indeed.
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