Sam Leith Sam Leith

Instant commentary on the Man Booker longlist is unavoidably stupid

So, the 2016 longlist – aka the Man Booker Dozen – is out. It invites a cavalcade of instant commentary, almost all of which – as I wrote when I was helping judge the prize myself last year – is unavoidably incredibly stupid.

Nobody other than the judges will have read all 150-odd of the books submitted, so in deploring this omission or groaning at that inclusion you say nothing much at all. That Graham Swift or Jonathan Safran Foer don’t appear this year doesn’t necessarily mean their books were bad. It means that the judges thought others were better. Have you read the others? No? Well, quite.

We make much of famous writers who have been ‘snubbed’, and we put the list through our diversity algorithms (how many women; how many brown people; how many Americans) in search of… I don’t know – signs of either racist or sexist bias, politically correct blandness or a gooey prostration before transatlantic glamour.

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