What became of the Booker? The 2025 shortlist
The Booker Prize Trophy
In 1971 VS Naipaul, one of the greatest writers of the post-war period won the Booker Prize, but only because Saul Bellow, one of the judges, stood up for him. It was the only time Naipaul ever won the Booker. He was only shortlisted one other time, in 1979, but an even more second-rate panel than in 1971 chose Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore instead. Naipaul was the only writer of colour to win the Booker till Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981, which began the post-colonial revolution in Britain.
Other fine writers sadly didn’t have a great writer like Bellow in their corner. Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Bowen, Doris Lessing and Angela Carter never won the Booker. Nor did William Boyd or Martin Amis. Zadie Smith was never even shortlisted. WG Sebald, perhaps the greatest British-based writer of the last fifty years didn’t win either. Never came close. Great novels like Flaubert’s Parrot, Money and A Month in the Country never won. Of course, if only by the law of averages, some very good writers have won the Booker, even if for the wrong book. Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question won but The Mighty Walzer and Coming from Behind didn’t. Julian Barnes won for The Sense of an Ending but not for Flaubert’s Parrot. Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam won but Atonement didn’t. Time’s Arrow was shortlisted but Money and London Fields were not.
How can we account for these weird anomalies and omissions? Sometimes it’s just personal. Martin Amis never won the Booker, just as Roth never won the Nobel Prize. Sometimes it’s a problem with genre. Comic novels don’t do well with the Booker, which is why Howard Jacobson’s best novels got overlooked (ditto Amis and David Lodge).
Bellow got it right. Booker panels have a thing for the “elegant tinkling teacup novel of the kind that you Brits do very well”. Writers of colour have, at last broken through. Jews not so much. Four Jewish winners in over half a century and only one (Howard Jacobson) in the last thirty-seven years. No recognition for Alan Isler’s wonderful The Prince of West End Avenue, Dannie Abse’s underrated The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas, no prizes for Sebald, Deborah Levy and Linda Grant. Fifty years ago, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala became the first (and last) Jewish refugee to win the Booker Prize, for Heat and Dust. Other Jewish refugee writers were not so lucky.
Some of the problems are obvious. The panels are too middlebrow. When you get Bellow, George Steiner and AS Byatt, you get winners like Naipaul, John Berger and Nadine Gordimer. In 1984, the year Flaubert’s Parrot and Money didn’t win, the panel included Polly Devlin and Baron Rowlands. Past panellists have included Joanna Lumley, Katie Derham, Trevor McDonald, Kate Saunders, Mary Wilson (the Prime Minister’s wife), Mariella Frostrup, Kenneth Baker, Sue Perkins, Dame Stella Rimington, this year Sarah Jessica Parker… The list goes on and on. Until recently the panels have not included many people of colour, many distinguished writers, the best publishers or the best critics.
Now the Booker judges have announced one of the poorest shortlists in the history of the Prize — but definitely one of the most cosmopolitan. Three Americans (Ben Markovits, Susan Choi and Katie Katamura). Kiran Desai was born in India but now lives in New York. David Szalay was born in Canada, grew up in London but now lives in Vienna. The only born and bred British writer of the six shortlisted authors is Andrew Miller.
Of course, the crimes and misdemeanours of the Booker are nothing compared with the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the best parts of Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth is the running story about how Roth never won the Nobel Prize. Of course, it was personal. The dull men of Stockholm hated all that sex and humour and took the allegations of misogyny more seriously than the rave reviews by writers like Bellow, Zadie Smith and Cynthia Ozick. When Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize, Roth said, “It’s okay, but next year I hope Peter, Paul and Mary get it.” Ozick wrote of American Pastoral, “They should stop fiddling in Stockholm already and make the telephone call.”
When Roth died, the BBC called him “arguably the best writer not to have won the Nobel Prize since Tolstoy”. Roth was in excellent company. Zola, Ibsen and Mark Twain, Graham Greene and Nabokov were all overlooked. So were Joyce, Auden and Borges. In 1974 Greene, Nabokov and Bellow were believed to be likely candidates for the prize. But the Academy decided on a joint award for the Swedish authors Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, both members of the Swedish Academy at the time.
The Booker Prize shortlist for 2021 was striking for three things. First, three of the writers on the shortlist were American-born and one was born in Sri Lanka but then lived in America. This was interesting for a prize which had at last become open to American writers but has resolutely ignored some of the best American writers of the last twenty five years: Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer (all Jews). Second, after years of neglecting writers of colour, the Booker started making up for past misdeeds. That year’s shortlist included one writer from Sri Lanka and another from Somaliland (and a third post-colonial writer, a white writer from South Africa). Third, the panel was made up of a journalist, an actor, a Nigerian writer, a former Archbishop and an American historian of empire. One writer, previously shortlisted twice. As usual, no publishers, literary biographers or academic literary critics. No Bellows, no Steiners, no Cyril Connollys, no John Careys (all past judges), no AS Byatts, Elizabeth Bowens or Hermione Lees.
The Booker used to be Britain’s premier literary prize. It was the one all British writers aspired to and many of the best British writers over the last half century won it. That year’s shortlist summed up not just the terrible state of the Booker but also the parlous state of British literary culture. American and post-colonial writers (ie writers of colour) come first. The 2021 Booker panel decided there wasn’t a single novel by a British-born writer that was worthy of their consideration. Not one. What did this say about the state of British writing?
Once upon a time, the Booker could invite Saul Bellow to be a judge and award the prize to VS Naipaul. In 2025 that all seems a terribly long time ago.
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