People read less: Do we still need the Booker Prize?
The world and it’s reading habits have changed – but has the Booker Prize changed too? And what purpose does it fulfil, asks Eliot Wilson
What is the point of literary prizes? The longlist for this year’s Booker Prize was announced on Tuesday, 13 works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, which must be written in English and published in the UK or Ireland to be eligible for fiction writing’s most prestigious award. They were chosen by the panel of judges from 163 submissions and will be reduced to a shortlist of six in September before the award ceremony on 9 November.
Yet this is happening while, we are regularly told, the practice of reading, and especially reading fiction, is in headlong retreat. A 2024 survey by the Reading Agency revealed that 50 per cent of adults in the UK do not read “regularly”; among 16-24-year-olds, a quarter had never been “regular” readers and another 44 per cent were “lapsed readers”. That means barely one in three young people reads as a matter of habit.
This combines with a decline in literacy to make a vicious cycle. Although the UK scores well in “basic proficiency” – 99 per cent, so essentially universal – that is deceptive. Around a fifth of adults are at or below level one literacy, which means they can read short, simple texts, find basic facts and understand clear lists. The Booker Prize might as well be in a foreign language; in some ways, it is.
What does this mean for the Booker Prize?
Does this make the Booker pointless? Is it an exercise of self-congratulation within an isolated, impenetrable elite, possessing all the vigour and relevance of an Anglo-Saxon spelling bee in Plantagenet England? The organisers are conscious of that danger: the chair of the panel of judges, cheerful national treasure Professor Dame Mary Beard, said they were “confident that our longlist of books has something for everyone”.
The composition of the panel – poet Raymond Antrobus, musician Jarvis Cocker, critic and editor Rebecca Liu and poet and novelist Patricia Lockwood – suggests a finely calibrated cocktail of erudition, profile, academe, creativity and popular culture. It is as if the Booker Prize Foundation has already prepared rebuttals for the first half-dozen accusations of elitism, populism, irrelevance, conformity, wokeism and generalised Wrongthink.
It is a dangerous line to tread. Sun Tzu observed as established fact that “one mark of a great soldier is that he fights on his own terms or fights not at all”, and there is a sense of the Booker allowing its critics to choose the field of battle. The prize is, it must be, about merit and only merit. If that were not the case, the judges could just go home and leave the award for the biggest-selling fiction book of the year. That indicates success of a crude kind.
It comes from good intentions. The first “Booker Prize for Fiction” was awarded in 1969, after publisher Jonathan Cape suggested wholesale food distributor Booker-McConnell might sponsor a new literary award. Booker-McConnell’s president, Lord Campbell of Eskan, was a well-born, half-Irish progressive with Fabian sympathies who had also, implausibly, been Ian Fleming’s golfing partner.
Having discussed legacy and rights with Fleming, when the James Bond creator died in 1964, Campbell paid £100,000 for 51 per cent of profits from worldwide royalties on Fleming’s books (but not the film franchise), and launched Bookers Authors’ Division, instructing “It should make money, not to mention being entertaining, and there could be advertising interest in it for some of our companies”. It went on to secure the copyrights of Dennis Wheatley, Georgette Heyer, Robert Bolt, Harold Pinter and, its commercial golden goose, Dame Agatha Christie.
What about the money?
The first Booker Prize was worth £5,000 (equivalent to around £105,000 today); the modern iteration carries £50,000 for the winner. It is not the biggest prize fund by means (the Nobel Prize for Literature, for example, is worth 11 million kronor, roughly £850,000), but a useful purse added to the Booker’s prestige and the likely boost in sales and publicity make it the trophy a wise British- or Irish-based author wants to secure.
To win it means your name can credibly be spoken in the same breath as those of Margaret Atwood, Dame Hilary Mantel, Julian Barnes, Howard Jacobson, John Banville, Sir Alan Hollinghurst, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, Sir Kingsley Amis, Sir Salman Rushdie, Dame Iris Murdoch or Sir Vidia Naipaul.
If the reading of long-form fiction is dying – and I hope the report of its death is an exaggeration – the Booker Prize cannot save it, at least not by trying to make the tent bigger or the discipline of literature more “accessible”. For that reason, Mary Beard’s well-meaning remark of the longlist including “something for everyone” sounds an alarm. A selection of 13 books based on excellence and merit cannot appeal to all, and perhaps shouldn’t.
Yes, the Booker Prize matters, so long as it fulfils its mission: to honour “the best sustained work of fiction written in English… that not only speaks to our current times, but also one that will endure and join the pantheon of great literature”. Those are high standards, but high standards are the only ones worth maintaining.