Last week, as Felicia has posted below, the Man Booker Prize was awarded to Irish author Anne Enright for her novel The Gathering. I have long felt the Man Booker to be the world’s most important prize for fiction, despite its strictures: it is awarded annually to a book written in English by a subject of the Commonwealth. Still, that means almost a third of the globe’s population is eligible. In theory at least, since even a cursory review of the Prize’s shortlist makes it readily apparent that the same names tend to recur: Iris Murdoch (6 nominations), Margaret Atwood (5 nominations), Salman Rushdie, etc…. Still, the scope of the prize is vast compared to other such recognitions. (If the prize was at one point a largely British affair, it is no longer: only two Brits have won the prize in the last decade.)
This internationalism is much of what gives the Booker its significance, I think. This year’s shortlist featured authors from Pakistan, New Zealand and India as well as England (including dreary prize perennial Ian McEwan). Compare that to the Prix Goncourt (nominally open to any work published in French). Last year, the prize was awarded to Jonathan Littell. This caused something of a stir since the author is *gasp* American (although he was brought up in France, wrote the book in French, and was widely expected to win). Amusingly, the author, who had previously been unsuccessful in his bid to gain French citizenship, was apparently fast-tracked for French citizenship once he had the Goncourt in his pocket – an incidental reminder that the Goncourt, like such prizes elsewhere, remains largely a national affair.