The Booker Prize: Empowering or performative?

The Booker Prize 2023 winner has been announced, and it has created a splash. The final six works were all by authors that have never previously been featured on the shortlist, and two of the novels were even debuts. While Paul Lynch took home the prize with Prophet Song, each of these six texts were selected for originality and excellence.

The 2023 shortlist

The Bee Sting, Paul Murray

A heart-warming exploration of financial struggles and failing relationships in the modern family.

Western Lane, Chetna Maroo

A moving debut novel about girlhood and grief. It navigates growing up, mediated through the joys of sport – in this case, squash.

Prophet Song, Paul Lynch

A bleak tale of a mother of four who, in the face of political strife and turmoil, strives to protect her family at all costs.

This Other Eden, Paul Harding

A historical fiction based on the story of the formerly enslaved people that populate Apple Island. A commentary on the threat of modern ‘civilisation’ to those deemed ‘different’, and a community’s fight to survive, banded together by hope.

If I Survive You, Jonathan Escoffery

An emotional and humorous novel, telling the story of two brothers who struggle to establish a life for themselves in the face of racism, financial struggles, and the climate crisis.

Study for Obedience, Sarah Bernstein

An unsettling story of prejudice and abuse against a newcomer to the rural north, all told by an unreliable narrator.

Visit the Booker Prize website for more details of the 2023 shortlist.

With a prize of £50,000, it is a widely sought-after competition. However, with the growing publicity and recognition of the Booker Prize, shortlisting can bring authors international publicity, increased book sales, and widespread acclaim that can transform their careers. The shortlisted authors also all receive £2,500.

So, it’s a form of Oscars for novels, yet the prize is often rewarded not just for the best-written novel, but also for one that is innovative, and widely accessible to a large readership.

Previous Booker Prize winners

Testaments by Margaret Atwood, co-winning with Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other 2019

Life of Pi by Yann Martel 2002

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart 2020

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee 1999

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan 1998

Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner 1984

Schindler’s Ark (Schindlers List) by Thomas Keneally 1982

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie 1981

But what is the Booker Prize, and how did it start?

First awarded in 1969, the aim of the prize was “to stimulate the reading and discussion of contemporary fiction,” but not just for readers and writers in Britain, and the wider Commonwealth, which today has extended to globally.

The idea was coined by publishers Tom Maschler and Graham Greene, and they were financially backed by Booker McConnel (hence the name ‘Booker’ prize) which was a conglomerate that had recently shown interest in literary estates in Guyana.

The Booker website indeed does not deny the presence of colonialism in the birth of the prize, the Booker Chairman Michael Caine stating “the Booker Prize can trace its origins through quirls of history and the imaginativeness of one individual, to James Bond and the attainment of political freedom in Guyana.”

However, the winning and shortlisted titles for the prize are often esteemed for their polemical narratives that promote the liberation of marginalised communities. With regard to the praise of freedom and libertinism, I feel as though the prize’s somewhat problematic funding and beginnings should be both highlighted and re-entered into common knowledge.

A brief history of the Bookers

During the nineteenth century, George Booker was a manager of 200 slaves working on his cotton plantation in Demerara, and his brother Josias wanted to expand his number of plantations to garner higher commercial success. The abolition of slavery was in 1807, but George and Josias Booker only started their slave exports in 1815, 8 years after the abolition.

When the abolition of slavery finally took full effect in 1834, the Booker brothers received compensation for their official emancipation of 52 enslaved individuals of the estimated 200, which earned the brothers £2,884 – the modern-day equivalent totalling £378,000. The former slave owners retained the enslaved people as unpaid ‘apprentices’, aligning with the British government guidelines so Booker was able to create a new “trading and shipping business” from 1835.

This system of labour continued until 1917 when people of East Indian descent became the largest ethnic group in British Guiana due to enslavement. In 1966, British Guiana became independent and changed its name to Guyana, which supposedly – as stated on the Booker website – is what truly started the prize, the freedom of Guyana.

The funding from the Booker group however came directly from the supposed emancipation of enslaved people who were then unpaid ‘apprentices’ for a further 83 years. This money from ‘The Booker Group’ continued to fund the prize until 2002 when the charitable foundation was replaced by ‘Crankstart’.

Who has openly opposed the prize? 

While the Booker Foundation does accept and publicise the origins of the prize with candour, the funding is still firmly stated to be the prize’s ‘prehistory’.

Despite the foundation trying to distance itself from colonial exploitation, previous nominees and winners of the prize have still voiced discomfort over the initial funding, suggesting that despite the foundation’s best efforts, the prize will remain entangled with associations of colonialism.

In 1972, winner John Berger publicly condemned sponsor Booker-McConnell’s colonial past and vowed to share his prize with people ‘in and from the Caribbean, people who are involved in a struggle to resist such exploitation’. Berger donated half of his £5,000 prize fund to Black Panthers, a British charity fighting racism and residual colonialism in Britain.

Modern-day critics highlight that the judging panel, despite being varied in gender and ethnicity, is also still solely British, despite judging literary works from all over the world from former Commonwealth states. Chris Holmes discusses the residual colonialist lens this judging panel creates in ‘The Booker Prize and Post-Imperial British Literature’, exploring how writers from postcolonial nations must therefore appeal to a British audience.

The shortlist for this year also contains works from Irish, Canadian, American, and British authors, perhaps because they already pertain to the Western structure of the novel and the English language, despite the prize welcoming entries from all former Commonwealth states.

Holmes states that the prize is a ‘return to imperial patronage in the guise of internationalism’, suggesting that the stories from other nations following lives of persecuted minorities could be an ‘exotic commodity’ appealing to the British, Western literary market.

Graham Huggan also demonstrates that for a book’s success in the Booker Prize, it must demonstrate this strife but in a British consumable fashion – using the English language and common Western novel structure, refusing discomfort in the Anglo-American white reader.

Stephen Levin names this culture of the Booker Prize a new form of “migrancy, cosmopolitanism, and the transcendence of the nation-state,” which appeals to the white reader, as it is attractively ‘exotic’.

Is this still relevant today? 

Is this just speculation? Is the Booker Prize truly a prize championing freedom, trying to right the wrongs of its colonial past by amplifying marginalised voices and stories of persecution?

Well, Bernadine Evaristo was the first ever black woman to win the Booker Prize with Girl, Woman, Other only in 2019, demonstrating that despite enjoying representation of marginalised groups, the groups themselves have not been recognised as creators. We are instead only consuming their suffering through a voice of a different nationality, ethnicity, or gender.

Furthermore, unfortunately, Baroness Nicholson, an honorary vice president of the Booker Foundation until 2020 after retiring from the board in 2009, has also created a stir in the media. The Vice President was homophobic and transphobic, attacking trans woman Munroe Bergdorf, as well as denouncing the legitimacy of equal marriage.

The Booker Prize released a statement claiming ‘We deplore racism, homophobia and transphobia – and do not discriminate on any grounds’ but it must be questioned whether the Booker Prize is truly as egalitarian and liberating as we might have expected.

Now the novels themselves are evidently not the issue, and perhaps the Booker Prize cannot be faulted for its past as it works extremely hard to amend its own wrongdoings. It may be important though to know the context under which this prize is awarded and what it represents.