Sample from Man Booker Prize 1996-2005

From Booker Prize Overview

Even before this suggestion of popularizing the prize, some people criticised the Man Booker for commercializing literature.  The chair of one judging panel, John Bayley, commented that ‘Highbrow critics sometimes object that although the Booker is the most prestigious in the world of the English novel, all such prizes tend to commercialize art’.  Certainly the media hype that now surrounds the prize is part of a slick public relations campaign designed to sell books (and reflect well on the sponsor).  There seems to be a suggestion in this argument that overt marketing activities attach to popular books like the Harry Potter series, or the Da Vinci Code, and are therefore not acceptable for ‘serious literature’.  Perhaps there are those who want to keep serious literature to themselves; if readers are only to find out about books through word of mouth or reading the right weeklies, then the market will be confined to a small group who are somehow ‘in the know’.  However this argument seems naïve and a bit snobbish.  Bayley goes on to say of the argument ‘I find this rubbish.

On the contrary I think that fashion and pretension are the great enemies of all fine art today.’  High powered marketing is now an integral part of all book publishing and selling, for serious and popular literature alike, with or without the Man Booker Prize.  But while books may be commodities, like soap powder, the enjoyment of reading a book is not like that of having the whitest washing.  Nor is the act of producing a book like that of mass producing soap powder.  The danger of treating books primarily as something to sell is not that too many people will buy them, but rather that books will be written in order to sell.  Having a prize like the Man Booker is hopefully a way of identifying what is excellent, rather than just what might be popular.  So what is it that the judges are looking for when they award the prize?  Fashion and pretension?  Pure pleasure?  Literary worth?