The inclusion of American writers in the Man Booker Prize will devalue it, the favourite to win the award this year has warned.
Man Booker 2013 shortlist
(clockwise, from top left): Eleanor Catton, Jhumpa Lahiri, Colm Toibin, NoViolet
Bulawayo, Jim Crace and Ruth Ozeki Photo: Getty,
Rex
Jim Crace predicted the accolade would start to lose its cachet in England if
it reached a stage where the majority of the authors on the shortlist were
Americans.
He also suggested that the book prize would only be the third most
prestigious in the United States, after the Pulitzer and the National Book
Awards, and would therefore be of little consequence there.
Crace, whose 13th book Harvest is the favourite to win the Man Booker on
October 15, was shortlisted for the award once before, in 1997 for Quarantine,
but did not win.
He told the London Evening Standard: “My prediction is
this: the driving force behind this [change] 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…
“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.”
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