The best literary spats of 2013

From Bret Easton Ellis's denouncement of Alice Munro to the Team Nigella backlash, John Dugdale looks back on the writers' rows of the year

• John Dugdale - The Guardian, Friday 13 December 2013 

Kate Middleton Photograph: Tim Ockenden/PA

Hilary Mantel v Daily Mail

After discussing various queens in her LRB lecture "Royal Bodies", Hilary Mantel (who had just collected another prize, the Costa book of the year) came to the Duchess of Cambridge. In contrast to Diana ("more royal than the family she joined"), she argued, Kate seemed "a shop window mannequin" apparently "designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile … precision-made, machine-made". Ripped out of context in the Mail as an "astonishing attack" on the nation's darling and heir-bearer, this made for a fine brouhaha, with leader writers, trolls and Messrs Cameron and Miliband doing most of the Mantel-bashing. But the Mail itself staged a debate between Julie Burchill (defending Mantel and calling Kate "Diana Lite") and AN Wilson. Mantel's defenders elsewhere included Sam Leith and Hadley Freeman.

Man Booker prize v British authors

After unveiling the 2013 prize's shortlist, Booker organisers were forced, by a newspaper leak, into a hastily arranged announcement that the 2014 prize would welcome all UK‑published fiction in English. Reaction from British authors was overwhelmingly hostile, with AS Byatt, Julian Barnes, Melvyn Bragg, Jim Crace, Antonia Fraser, Linda Grant, Philip Hensher, Howard Jacobson and Jeanette Winterson all anti. Among leading novelists, only AL Kennedy and Eleanor Catton came out in favour including Americans and others and publishers and agents (having US novelists on their lists too) tended to be pro or neutral. Meanwhile, the side-feud between the Booker and the new Folio prize (which from the outset had said Americans would be eligible) continued, as the rival award issued a statement* expressing "surprise" and faux-concern that the Booker had decided to "abandon its parameters", ie possibly mischievously positing an identity crisis. Booker types insisted, to widespread disbelief, that the move's timing (and its new "e-academy") had nothing to do with the upstart award.

Jonathan Franzen v Amazon, Twitter and Rushdie

Perhaps because it embraced the entirety of the contemporary west, Franzen's denunciation in a Guardian essay of "technoconsumerism" – which distracts us from impending disaster by enslaving us to online shopping (with Amazon's Jeff Bezos called a "horseman of the apocalypse") and social media – offered little for his many critics to get a handle on – except for his criticism of Salman Rushdie for "succumbing" to Twitter, and a follow-up radio interview on the Today programme criticising publishers for requiring authors to tweet. @SalmanRushdie pointed out that he, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Nathan Englander and Gary Shteyngart were all avid tweeters, and told him to "enjoy your ivory tower" (although Rushdie has since announced a social media sabbatical). Other writers on Twitter, such as @sophiehannahCB1, joined in, with the most sarcastic reaction coming from @Tao_Lin, who seemingly mocked Franzen's apocalyptic scenario with a tweet urging his followers: "INVASION RED ALERT RED ALERT MAN THE BATTLE STATIONS".

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