Wood praises 'inclusive' Booker Prize eligibility rules

Gaby Wood, literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, championed the "inclusive" nature of the award's current entry criteria at last night's celebration of the 2019 shortlist. 

Addressing around 200 people at the event at the Serpentine Gallery in London, Wood stressed the Prize under its current rules does not discriminate against any authors. The award is now open to anyone writing in English and published in the UK, whereas before 2014, only writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth could enter. 

Wood said: “The attention of the judges is not really as a process of elimination, it’s intended as a form of welcome. As many of you know there’s been some discussion about eligibility now that the Booker Prize is open to anyone writing in English and published in the UK. As things stand the prize doesn’t discriminate against authors based on their passports any more than it would discriminate against them based on the colour of their skin or their gender. Our feeling is that the longer we continue to be inclusive, however this pans out in any given year, the more likely it is that future generations of readers will be open-minded, global, egalitarian thinkers. Because that’s who the prize is really for - readers."

Shortlisted author Bernardine Evaristo with judges Afua Hirsch and Liz Calder

Expanding on the scale of the Prize, which saw Mexican-Italian author Valeria Luiselli make the longlist with her first novel written in English and Turkish-British author Elif Shafak make the shortlist, Wood added: "You’ll have noticed that two of the 13 longlisted writers were writing in a language that was not their first. I think that’s the first time this has happened and it’s definitely worth celebrating. Language evolves, and literature evolves. You see it in the students we’ve given the Booker Prize Scholarship at the University of East Anglia, in the past few years a Nigerian afro-futurist, an Australian writing crime fiction featuring an Aboriginal detective, a student from Wolverhampton writing his own version of Cormac McCarthy set in the Black Country. There are no borders to what they are reading and no borders to what they are writing and that’s true in the judges’ room too. This is what the future looks like, the future of literature anyway.” 

Last year a group of publishers wrote to the Man Booker organisers urging them to rescind the rule change that had allowed US authors to enter, after American writers featured heavily in some shortlists. When Crankstart was announced as the new prize sponsor this spring, some publishers repeated calls for a rethink. But Wood's words suggest no change is currently on the cards.

Former winners Margaret Atwood with The Testaments (Chatto & Windus) and Salman Rushdie with Quichotte (Jonathan Cape) are both in the running for the £50,000 prize this year alongside Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press), Shafak's 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Viking), Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton) and An Orchestra of Minorities (Little Brown) by Chigozie Obioma. Evaristo, Ellman and Shafak all attended the shortlist celebration party.

Elif Shafak and Baroness Helena Kennedy QC

Addressing the shortlist, head of judges Peter Florence last night praised the publishing industry's vibrancy, noted that former winners Atwood and Rushdie are "at the top of their game" with their latest books, and defended the length of Ellman's 998 page single-sentence monologue. 

"What we have encountered is a publishing industry of such vibrance and adventure, of extraordinary devotion and care, superb editing, wonderful  publishing, beautiful book design, stunning typeset and we’ve lucked into what must be the most phenomenal submission and nominations year that I can ever remember in my reading life," said Florence. 

If Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, goes on to win, it would be the longest winning novel in the prize’s history. The current longest winning novel is The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, in 2013, at 832 pages. 

Florence added: "There was a lot of comment about the length of Lucy Ellman’s novel. It is a long as a breath, as long a many ideas that tumble over each other and fill our hearts and minds. A thousand pages is as nothing, it’s perfect in many ways."