Man Booker 2014: more global, less diverse | Books | The Guardian

The Booker opened up to the world - and to some, the publishing world looked a little narrower. With American authors eligible for the first time, the resulting lineup is unsurprisingly Anglo-American in flavour - chair of judges AC Grayling said publishers had been concentrating on pushing their US authors - but also overwhelmingly white and male. No African or Indian authors, and only one British woman. Globalisation often tends towards a monoculture, and the other much-debated rule change, whereby past success increases the number of books a publisher may submit, can only push the prize towards the establishment. The small-press surprises and unknown debutantes that have been a fixture of recent years are notably absent - though notable too is the prize's first crowd-funded long-listee, eco-activist Paul Kingsnorth's Old English tale of resistance to the Norman invasion.