A Yankee Takeover?

The whisper that the new sponsors of the Booker Prize for Fiction, the Man Group, might be considering opening it up to American authors has caused a furore in British literary circles. Lisa Jardine, chair of this year's Booker panel, declared that it will make the award 'blandly generic' and said: 'With someone like Roth at his best, I can't see how an Amis or a McEwan would touch them.' But the contrary view was expressed by Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Guardian: 'apart from Bellow, I can think of only four American novelists - Michael Chabon, Gail Godwin, Craig Nova and Anne Tyler - whose work could be submitted to an international competition with any confidence. The rest is assembly-line product, each as indistinguishable from any other as one Ford Mondeo from another, self-referential and self-absorbed, technically competent but thematically empty or banal.'