The announcement of the 2024 longlist of the Booker prize is all but guaranteed to reignite the perennial row about opening up Britain’s premier literary prize to Americans. Six out of 13 longlisted authors are American, leaving room for only three from Britain and one from Ireland. There are no writers from the Indian subcontinent, Caribbean or Africa, excepting the British-Libyan writer Hisham Matar.
You will often hear British writers complain that opening the prize up to Americans in 2014 was an error. It’s worth stressing that America’s National Book Award and Pulitzer are open only to American residents. But Americans aren’t all delighted either. More than one US publisher has told me that a Booker listing was one of the few ways of generating