Man Booker judges: 'submissions needed more editing'

The judges who selected the Man Booker Prize 2018 shortlist yesterday (Thursday 20th September) have spoken out about a lack of thorough editing on some of the books submitted for the £50,000 award.

Speaking at the shortlist press conference, chair of the judges Kwame Anthony Appiah noted: “We occasionally felt that inside the book we read was a better one, sometimes a thinner one, wildly signalling to be let out. We’re all writers as well as readers and we all value the work of editors. There were times when we felt this editorial role could have been, shall we say, more energetically performed.”

He clarified: “This is not a complaint against the very idea of the long immersive read. One of the books on our shortlist is very long indeed [Richard Powers' The Overstory is 500-plus pages] and we thought it earned its length... but the chastening pencil has its role and subtraction can be as potent as addition."

Fellow judge Val McDermid said sometimes problems with editing could arise when a good editor doesn’t have long enough, while sometimes the editors just aren’t good enough, and some writers won’t listen to editorial advice. “I think young editors coming through are not necessarily getting the kind of training and experience-building apprenticeship that happened when I was starting out, for example,” she said.

Reservations were also raised by the judges about a shortage of fiction submitted for consideration for the prize from the global south.

Appiah commented: “While there were some from the global south [of the 170 submissions received] there were fewer than we had expected. I imagine that’s because either they aren’t being published in the numbers hoped for or the publishers in selecting them mistook our willingness to read the books - we would happily read more of them.

"I understand it’s a challenge for publishers as it’s a new jury each year ... but there are very fine novels being written in the global south and some are published in England and some are not but ones hope would be future juries will have more of those to look at ... Our reading experience would have felt to us more properly representative if there had been more of them.”

Anna Burns' Milkman (Faber), Esi Edugyan's Washington Black (Serpent's Tail), Daisy Johnson's Everything Under (Jonathan Cape), Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room (Jonathan Cape), Richard Powers' The Overstory (William Heinemann) and Robin Robertson's The Long Take (Picador), make up the shortlist for this year's Man Booker Prize.

Although the list has been well-received by booksellers, it has had a more downbeat reception in the press, with Robbie Millen in the Times describing it as "reader-repellent", with the gloomy subject matter of the choices making it "as depressing as a drizzly February night in Finland's fourth biggest city without booze", while in the Guardian, Sian Cain compared the shortlist to the more inclusive longlist, saying "the Booker feels suddenly far more narrowly conceived."

The paperback edition of Milkman was published yesterday (20th),on the day of its shortlisting announcement.