Man Booker will seem 'less essential' in England now Americans can enter

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

By Rosa Silverman

The Telegraph -  01 Oct 2013

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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