{"id":1521,"date":"2017-10-18T16:03:20","date_gmt":"2017-10-18T15:03:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reading.ac.uk\/the-forum\/?p=1521"},"modified":"2017-10-18T16:03:20","modified_gmt":"2017-10-18T15:03:20","slug":"man-booker-prize-winner-could-open-floodgates-for-american-novelists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/2017\/10\/18\/man-booker-prize-winner-could-open-floodgates-for-american-novelists\/","title":{"rendered":"Man Booker Prize winner could open floodgates for American novelists"},"content":{"rendered":"

By David Brauner, Professor of Contemporary Literature, University of Reading<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lincoln in the Bardo<\/em> is a worthy winner of the Man Booker Prize and is further confirmation of the supremacy of American authors in the field of contemporary fiction, following Paul Beatty’s win last year for The Sellout<\/em>.<\/p>\n

With a few notable exceptions, British novelists seem tame and timid in comparison to their American counterparts. It was great to see Kazuo Ishiguro win the Nobel Prize but he would probably be the first to agree with Garrison Keillor<\/a> that it’s a scandal that so many of the great contemporary Americans – Philip Roth pre-eminent among them – have been consistently overlooked for the honour. Every year, for the best part of two decades, Roth has been heavily tipped for the prize \u2013 alongside fellow Americans Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates \u2013 but when, last year, they finally decided to give it to an American writer (an American Jewish writer, at that), it was Robert Zimmerman (aka Bob Dylan) who got the nod.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For the first couple of years after the Booker threw its doors open to the Americans in 2014, I feared that they might be guilty of similar perversity: the shortlists in 2014 and 2015 (which produced winners from Australia and Jamaica, respectively) seemed designed to reassure those British novelists (such as Philip Hensher and A.S. Byatt) who had predicted that the Americans would colonise the prize and marginalise Commonwealth writing.<\/p>\n

In the last two years, however, the tide has turned, with first Beatty\u2019s victory and now Saunders\u2019. I had thought that perhaps another American author on this year\u2019s shortlist, Paul Auster, might win for 4321<\/em>, as I had hoped that the prize in 2015 might have gone to Anne Tyler\u2019s A Spool of Blue Thread <\/em>(on the basis that the recipients of the Prize often win for works that are not their best, making the prize implicitly more of a lifetime\u2019s achievement award).<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m glad that Saunders \u2013 who also won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2014 for his short-story collection Tenth of December<\/em> \u2013 prevailed, because Lincoln in the Bardo <\/em>was, quite simply, the best (which is to say the most ground-breaking generically, intellectually ambitious, stylistically brilliant) novel on the shortlist.<\/p>\n

Spare a thought, though, for Ali Smith \u2013 now four times the bridesmaid and never the bride. She is one of the few Brits who I would put in the same company as the best contemporary American authors. What\u2019s the betting that her next novel will win, even if it isn\u2019t as good as the four that have already been shortlisted but missed out on the prize?<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the betting, also, that contemporary American novelists will dominate the Booker for many years to come?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By David Brauner, Professor of Contemporary Literature, University of Reading Lincoln in the Bardo is a worthy winner of the Man Booker Prize and is further confirmation of the supremacy…Read More ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"__cvm_playback_settings":[],"__cvm_video_id":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[542,552],"class_list":["post-1521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-heritage-creativity","tag-literature","tag-man-booker-prize"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMan Booker Prize winner could open floodgates for American novelists - Connecting Research<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/2017\/10\/18\/man-booker-prize-winner-could-open-floodgates-for-american-novelists\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Man Booker Prize winner could open floodgates for American novelists - 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