Today judges announced the Man Booker Dozen that have made it onto the long list for 2013. Last year Hilary Mantel won it for the second time and with a sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which is the 2nd book in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy.
I have just finished reading Diana Athill’s excellent book Stet, An Editor’s Life arguably the person with the longest active memory of the history of books and publishing today, she won the Costa Prize for her most recent memoir Somewhere Near the End in 2009, when she was 93 years old. Stet, she wrote at the sprightly age of 80 shortly after retiring.
In the book she mentions the launch of the Booker Prize, mentioning that in the sixties, it was becoming more and more costly and less profitable to publish books and to compete against the bigger publishing houses. It was becoming difficult to sustain a publishing house that appealed to the more literary reader. She describes the two kinds of reader that existed, still relevant today:
People who buy books, not counting useful how-to-do-it books are of two kinds. There are those who buy because they love books and what they can get from them, and those to whom books are one form of entertainment among several. The first group, which is by far the smaller, will go on reading, if not for ever, then for as long as one can forsee. The second group has to be courted. It is the second which makes the best-seller, impelled thereto by the buzz that a particular book is really something special; and it also makes publishers’ headaches, because it has become more and more resistant to courting.
The Booker Prize was instigated in 1969 with the second group in mind: make the quality of a book news by awarding it an impressive amount of money, and hoi polloi will prick up their ears.
It worked for the books named, but the underlying aim to convert more people to reading did not. Not much has changed. The latest attempt to convert the population into reader, we could say is World Book Night, where publishers print thousands of books for free and they are given out on one night in the year, to people who don’t really read. Has that worked? Unlikely I think.
But onto the prize for 2013, this year’s long listed titles and authors are:
Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
Jim Crace, Harvest
Eve Harris, The Marrying of Chani Kaufman
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland
ColmTóibín, The Testament of Mary
Colum McCann, TransAtlantic – my review here
Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart – my review here
NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names – my review here
Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire
Richard House, The Kills
Alison MacLeod, Unexploded
Charlotte Mendelson, Almost English
Eve Harris, The Marrying of Chani Kaufman
Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Congratulations to all those authors and good luck to anyone hoping to read the list, I’ve only read one and I do have The Spinning Heart, so I guess that will next.
The shortlist will be announced on 11 September and the winner on 16 October.
Time to get reading!
Word by Word 