The sad decline of the Booker Prize

There was a magnificent chorus of spluttering and gasping in literary London last week when it was announced that the actress Sarah Jessica Parker was to be one of the judges for the Booker Prize. As one critic remarked, ‘Just because she plays a writer of sorts in Sex and the City doesn’t mean that she is one.’ In fairness, the appointment is not quite as strange as it initially appeared. Not only is Parker a keen reader who frequently offers literary recommendations on her Instagram account to her near ten million followers (most recently, Linda Grant’s The Story of the Forest), but she sufficiently impressed Penguin to be given her own imprint at the publisher, SJP at Hogarth, which she parlayed into an independent imprint, SJP Lit, last year.

Nonetheless, Parker’s own glitzy, Hollywood, and moneyed existence sits uneasily with the usual clichés of penniless writers shivering at home in moth-eaten cardigans as they attempt to write the novel that is going to, finally, mean that they are able to turn the heating on and pay off their outstanding bills. Parker is a woman who is accustomed to private jets and first-class travel, whereas many of the writers nominated for the Booker would struggle to afford a return flight on Ryanair. Literary fiction may be an artistically respectable profession, but it is not a lucrative one. One eminent, Booker-shortlisted novelist was being paid advances in the low thousands by the end of his life, and that was considered generous.

In its heyday, the Booker Prize was a vast, set-piece televised affair. Writers being writers, and booze flowing, there was usually some kind of scandal or controversy. When Kingsley Amis was finally awarded the Booker in 1986 for The Old Devils, he acknowledged the prize’s mixed reputation in his acceptance speech by saying, ‘Until just now, I had thought the Booker Prize a rather trivial, showbizzy caper, but now I consider it a very serious, reliable indicator of literary merit.’ He was not the first or last writer to be accused of giving a speech drunk (‘So I was, of course, but not to the extent suggested’), but his behaviour was mild compared to the warring judges over the years. His friend Philip Larkin threatened to throw himself out of a window if his preferred choice, Paul Scott’s Staying On, did not win in 1977 – thankfully, it did – and the ever-fiery Carmen Callil denounced Arundhati Roy’s winning novel The God of Small Things as ‘execrable’ on television, and declared that it should never even have been shortlisted, let alone win.

Then there are the usual displays of writerly ego. Anthony Burgess refused to attend the ceremony in 1980 unless he was told in advance that Earthly Powers had won (it was a toss-up between that and William Golding’s Rites of Passage, and Golding won out, leaving Burgess humiliated). The attention-seeking impresario Peter Florence made the decision in 2019 to split the award between Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo, declaring, ‘We came down to a discussion with the director of the Booker Prize about the rules. And we were told quite firmly that the rules state that you can only have one winner… and as we have managed the jury all the way through on the principle of consensus, our consensus was that it was our decision to flout the rules and divide this year’s prize to celebrate two winners.’

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Yet for all this scuttlebutt and incident, the regrettable fact remains that people do not care about the Booker Prize in the way that they once did. The battle between Burgess and Golding was once front-page news, but this year’s victory for Samantha Harvey’s Orbital was largely relegated to the arts sections. The decision in 2013 to open up the prize to American writers – to huge controversy – has meant that the Booker has turned into yet another international literary jamboree, where well-funded publishers can do their best to push their author for the £50,000 prize. But most damning of all, the prize’s dwindling relevance reflects the way in which serious writing is no longer taken seriously in society. It is taken as read that the average man no longer buys literary fiction, but increasingly women are eschewing it too, preferring the ‘romantasy’ sub-genre driven by TikTok. You may never have heard of Sarah J. Maas, but her books have sold 37 million copies so far: an amount that would dwarf the combined sales of many of the past Booker winners put together.

The publicity-baiting appointment of Parker as a judge has had its desired effect. People are now talking about next year’s prize with an interest and no doubt there will be considerable publicity about how the actress chooses to pursue her judging duties. (I foresee a lot of Zoom calls.) But celebrity gossip aside, it is more likely than not that next year’s winner will be another well-regarded and worthy book that receives a dutiful amount of attention at the time and ends up forgotten a year or so after.

For other writers of serious literary fiction, struggling to get by with side gigs and non-literary hustles, the first-class, no-expense-spared lifestyle of Parker must seem a distant prospect indeed. But acting, at least, remains a glamorous and lucrative profession at its highest levels. Writing novels that fewer and fewer people want to read cannot compare. I wonder if this once-legendary prize will meet just as dramatic a demise as Carrie Bradshaw’s paramour Mr Big did. Perhaps one day its sponsors might pull the plug and the Booker will collapse. This would be a tragedy for serious literature, but a reflection of its irrelevance. And that is a regrettable, unarguable fact.