Jim Crace: ‘I’ve never read a Dickens and I’ve never read a Hardy. Or a Brontë. Or a Virginia Woolf. Or a Henry James’

Jim Crace, heavyweight favourite to win this year’s Man Booker Prize for Harvest, has some surprising literary blind spots, we discover

History man: Jim Crace was inspired to write Harvest, about the enclosure of a nameless, more or less medieval village, when he noticed the “deeply etched ridge and furrow” of the English countryside from the train © Matt Writtle 2013

David Sexton 

Published: 01 October 2013 - London Evening Standard

Jim Crace may be the favourite to win this year’s Man Booker Prize in a fortnight’s time but that’s not enough to make him diplomatic about the changes recently announced to the award. That’s not his style. Clear and precise statement is much more his thing.

When I meet him he is equally definite about the many reasons you might have not to like his books, the many great British novelists he’s never read — “I’ve never read a Dickens and I’ve never read a Hardy, no. Or a Brontë. Or a Virginia Woolf. Or a Henry James” — and the folly of the Man Booker administrators in opening the prize to American novelists in future.

When I ask him what he thinks about this, he says: “I don’t have an opinion but I do have a prognosis, if you’d like to hear it?” A nod suffices. “My prediction is this: the driving force behind this is money people who want to make the Man Booker logo global, and they’re going to fail because it’s going to be the third prize in America. It can’t take on the Pulitzer and it can’t take on the National Book Awards. I’ve won the existing third prize in America, which is the National Book Critics Circle Award [for Being Dead, 1999] and it’s lovely to win it but it didn’t make much difference to anything. I think the Booker in America might be the same.”

“As soon as you get a couple of years running in which the majority of people on that shortlist are Americans, it will seem less essential in England — and therefore they will have succeeded in turning something which is really focused and important into something that is semi-failing in two places.”

Plus, he adds, with emphasis, “it will mean that fewer up-and-coming Commonwealth writers will get a showing. There’ll be fewer new or small publishing houses. And, third, most importantly in my view, it’s like saying the Commonwealth Games should be open to Americans — because we want it to reflect the best in athletics. The Commonwealth Prize is about celebrating the Commonwealth and the special relationship we have with the ex-colonies — which is part guilt and part warmth — and the Booker Prize isn’t an essential part of that but it is part of that. So I think that in every respect this is an own goal.”

More