Booker Prize: onwards and upwards

If English is to be, or has already become, the world language, then an English-speaking book prize should logically become the world's biggest, most influential, book prize. Only Britain or America have a big enough domestic publishing base to pull it off, and the Americans seem to have got lost somewhere between the Pulitzers and the National Book Awards. And we don't need to worry about the Nobel Prize - that is basically a lifetime achievement award, not for a single book like the Booker, and the Nobel committee hasn't quite recovered from the bizarre decision to give it to Bob Dylan a few years ago.

So all of that leaves a clear run for the Booker to become really very big indeed.