... we should.
If this country's 'provincial' writers are overshadowed now, they will get
barely a passing glimpse in the bright, transatlantic literary future.
The Independent - Sunday 22 September 2013
Literary light: Canadian Yann Martel, whose Life of Pi won the Man
Booker in 2002, will soon be joined in the shortlists by his American peers
AFP/Getty Images
Of all last week's scraps of arts world intelligence, the news that the
Man Booker Prize was extending its catchment area to include any novel
published in English in this country, thereby admitting a whole crowd of
distinguished Americans to the party, was by far the most predictable. Like
business, literature is either global or niche these days, and a prize which
hitherto confined itself to the Commonwealth, Zimbabwe and the Republic of
Ireland had begun to look increasingly out on a limb.
Equally predictable was the response of much of that dispersed and
variegated demographic known as the UK literary community. This (primarily)
westward-gazing rule-change is, it hastened to insist, unnecessary, for there
are already international and Asian Man Booker prizes. It will increase the
weight of the institutionalising blanket that already hangs over British
literature like a shroud.
The new rules are, additionally, weighted in favour of major publishers
at the expense of maverick, minor outfits, and the general effect will be to
increase the chances of the creative-writing graduate published on both sides
of the Atlantic, who spends his, or her life, commuting between teaching jobs
at Iowa State and Bologna, while diminishing the hopes of Anne Unknown of
Sheffield, author of "I Were Reet Mardy T'other Night
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