Booker makes a smaller splash

Booker makes a smaller splash

Sep 16 2008

In a year when the "Booker dozen" (the long-listed titles for the annual Booker award) sold fewer than 14,000 copies (barely 1,000 each) in the five weeks between the list's unveiling and the announcement of the short list, the Independent newspaper asks whether "the British audience for ambitious fiction [is] dying off, losing faith, or just drifting away?"

Both marketplace and media offer ever-shrinking space for "literary fiction". The prize ceremony, which once secured its own BBC program, now has to make do with a scrappy insert in the news. The Orange and Costa contests loom far larger as heavyweight rivals. Rather sadly, award director Ion Trewin has been reduced to branding the Booker as "Richard and Judy for grown-ups" (the Richard & Judy bookclub in the UK is the equivalent of Oprah's bookclub in the USA).

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