Booker Prize Research Articles

‘So Much for Literary Democracy’

Abstract This study examines the effect and impact of literary prizes, focusing on the Not the Booker Prize (NTBP) and its reception on social media platforms. The NTBP, organized by The Guardian, served as a counter to the prestigious Man Booker Prize, offering a more democratic alternative in which the audience is allowed a central role in nominating and voting for books. This article examines the impact of the 2012 scandal surrounding the NTBP, in which allegations of vote-rigging and author canvassing led to significant controversy. By analysing the Twitter discourse, the study explores how scandal influences the perception and value of literary awards. The findings highlight the tension between professional and lay criticism, the role of social media in literary evaluation, and the transformation of literary prizes in the digital age. Finally, the article emphasizes that cultural gatekeeping is undergoing significant change, while pointing out contradictions and frictions besetting the democratization of the literary field.

REMARKS ON THE CONTEMPORARY VISIBILITY OF BULGARIAN LITERATURE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

This article provides a summary of the current status of Bulgarian literature in the United Kingdom through the prism of works featured in four of the main British literary translation prizes: the International Booker Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and the EBRD Literature Prize. Initially, after a brief overview of perspectives on literary translation in United Kingdom, the four prizes are contextualised within wider developments. Using available online data from the websites of each award, the prize-winners, shortlists, and longlists are examined to determine if literary works translated from Bulgarian are present, with the finding that very few have featured to date. However, with the award of the 2023 International Booker Prize to Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Time Shelter, translated into English by Angela Rodel, selected media and popular responses to this news are also briefly presented, as is the immediate impact of Time Shelter’s victory on the profile of translated Bulgarian literature in the United Kingdom. In identifying nascent but growing interest from publishers and readers in English translations of Bulgarian literary works, the article acknowledges existing initiatives to promote Bulgarian-English literary translation. It also provides some suggestions on how to capitalise on this newfound visibility in the British context.

20th Biennial Conference of the International Planning History Society 2–5 July 2024 (Hong Kong) prizes and awards

ABSTRACT The winners of the IPHS 2024 Prize and Awards were announced at the Awards Ceremony at the Hong Kong Conference on 4 July 2024. This year, the recipients include the Planning Perspectives Prize, IPHS Book Prizes, Anthony Sutcliffe Dissertation Award, IPHS Best Postgraduate Planning History Paper Prize, Sir Peter Hall Award for Lifetime Achievement, the East Asia Planning History (EAPH) Prize, and IPHS Professional Commendation Award. However, the Koos Bosma Prize in Planning History Innovation was not awarded as no submission met the criteria. The Judging Panel Reports provide additional information and commendations.

The English Studies Interview with Alan Hollinghurst: In Conversation with Dominic Dean

ABSTRACT Alan Hollinghurst is the author of seven novels including The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The Stranger’s Child (2011), The Sparsholt Affair (2017), and The Line of Beauty (2004), with the latter winning the 2004 Man Booker Prize. He is widely celebrated for his distinctive style, his tragicomical explorations of English life in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and his introduction of richly imagined and humanely observed gay themes to mainstream literary fiction. His latest novel is Our Evenings (2024). Alan Hollinghurst spoke with Dominic Dean about Our Evenings, its themes, inspirations and treatment of social and political history; the role of buildings and material objects in his fiction; his style and formal innovations and influences; and his relationships with TV adaptations and with the literary academy.

Unraveling the Theme of Theodicy in Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad Through the Literary Devices of Allusion

This article explores the theme of theodicy in Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad through the literary devices of allusion. It claims that the author evokes theodicean emotions or associations, and engages readers' prior knowledge and cultural awareness to empower religious and cultural identity in his work throughout three kinds of allusions. Showing a unique view on the consequences of civil war and violence on both individuals and society, Saadawi's novel, winning the "Arabic Booker Prize," obviously intertwines together elements of horror, political allegory, and dark satire. The aim of this work is to examine the theodicy behind this diverse coexistence novelty implied behind these allusions that contributes to the understanding of the themes of the novel. The study revealed that Saadawi alludes to different aspects of references, which all contribute to the comprehension and presentation of religious and cultural identities that explore the evil of his national culture

Crossing Borders Between Languages: The Great Transition of Hindi Literary Translation with Special Reference to Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand

The surging number of Hindi speakers in recent decades raises an intriguing question: does the expanding influence of Hindi across India lead to the commensurate pan-Indianization or globalization of its literature? Despite its widespread use within the country, Hindi literature often remains overshadowed by Indian English literature (IEL), particularly on the global stage. It appears to be somewhat confined within regional boundaries. However, a transformative event occurred in 2022 when Geetanjali Shree, a Delhi-based Hindi novelist, clinched the prestigious International Booker Prize for her work, Tomb of Sand, originally titled Ret Samadhi in Hindi. The prize was equally shared between Geetanjali Shree, the writer, and Daisy Rockwell, the translator. With this award, Tomb of Sand has emerged as a symbol of Hindi literary translation, heralding a significant transition in the Hindi literary translation scene. This paper aims to explore the challenges and prospects of Hindi literary translation in the era of the great transition, focusing specifically on the translation methods and strategies employed in Tomb of Sand. Through this analysis, I intend to contribute to the ongoing scholarly discourse concerning the promotion and appreciation of Hindi literature in international literary circles.

Hernan Díaz on “Trust” in Literature

ABSTRACT Hernan Díaz, an Argentine-American writer, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of two novels published in thirty-seven languages. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1973 and moved to Sweden with his family when he was two. He earned a BA in literature in the University of Buenos Aires, a MA degree at King’s College London, and received his PhD in comparative literature from New York University. His first novel, In the Distance (2017), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. His second novel, Trust (2022), received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.” Díaz is also the author of Borges, between History and Eternity, whose essays and stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. This conversation took place in Shanghai, China, on May 12, 2024. It delves into the complexities of trust in literature, exploring the relationship between author and reader, translation and global readership, and the notion of American Dream. It also discusses the nature of narrative, the relationship between fiction and truth, the ethical considerations in fiction writing, as well as Díaz’s transnational experience and academic work.

FOOD AND COOKING AS COMIC RELIEF IN IRIS MURDOCH’S THE SEA, THE SEA

As a literary term, comic relief is the appearance of humorous and funny episodes or scenes in otherwise serious literary works. The aim of comic relief is to reduce the anxiety or distress that the audience feels as a result of the depiction of the painful and pitiful events or incidents. The joy and laughter that comic relief provides balance the intensity of the misery and sadness which are inherent in the narrative. Although comic relief is mostly associated with dramatic works, the scenes of food and cooking in Iris Murdoch’s 1978 Booker Prize winner novel The Sea, the Sea illustrate some proper examples of the term. Murdoch’s protagonist, the retired playwright and director Charles Arrowby, cheerfully cooks and eats whenever the mental anxiety rises to a critical level. Charles displays his enjoyment of preparing and having food so intensely that his happiness and thrill easily neutralise the uneasiness of the reader. This paper aims to illustrate how a protagonist’s delight at food and cooking serves as comic relief which reduces the intensity of the unease caused by a sad story.

THE MYTHOLOGEME "PODRÓŻ" / "TRAVELS" AND ITS LINGUISTIC REPRESENTERS IN OLGA TOKARCHUK’S NOVEL "BIEGUNI" ("RUNNER")

The article is devoted to the study of the means of linguistic objectification of the mythologeme "PODRÓŻ" / "TRAVELS" in Olga Tokarchuk’s novel "Bieguni". Mythological thinking as a special kind of world-view includes a sensory, figurative understanding of natural phenomena and facts of social life. The main purpose of the article is to analyze the linguistic representation of the mythologeme "TRAVELS" by Polish writer Olga Tokarchuk, the winner of literary prizes ("Nike" 2008, International Booker Prize, Nobel Prize 2018). The research material provides an opportunity to reveal the archetypal and topical understanding of the mythologeme "TRAVELS", characteristic not only for the mythopoetic thinking of the archaic society, but also for the consciousness of contemporary speakers, and the individual author’s world-view of the literary discourse regarded. To achieve this goal, methods of descriptive, component and discursive analysis are used. The analysis allows us to state that O. Tokarchuk provides rather complete information about this mythological phenomenon, which is both a static structure because it contains a system of images and a dynamic one, because it is able to unfold in the form of a plot. The author creatively interprets and modifies the archetypal mythologeme, which embodies the human aptitude for travels and travelling as cognition of the world around, one of the manifestations of human freedom, filling it with new culturally marked semantics, creating a special mythosymbolic model of the world in which the mythologeme "PODRÓŻ" can mean life, interpersonal contacts, loneliness in the crowd, movement without movement, movement as an exploration of oneself through the cognition of the world around, search for the mystery of existence, etc. Only by travelling, says the writer, we can reconstruct the link lost by the mankind between individual traditions and cultures. We see the prospects of the research in the further separation of archetypal and individual authorial treatment in literary texts in the interpretation of mythologists.

What Future for a Europe of the Past? Myth, Memory, and the Map of Time in the Work of Jean Raspail and Georgi Gospodinov

ABSTRACT This essay engages with two novels about European memory, Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973 in French, English trans. Norman Shapiro, 2011 best-seller after being recommended by Marine le Pen) and Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (2020 in Bulgarian, English trans. Angela Rodel, 2023 winner of the International Booker Prize). The novels dramatize the sense of European crisis as the choice of “a Europe of the past” driven by “a critical deficit of future,” but they differ fundamentally in the ways they portray “Europe” and the possible ways out of its current predicament. While Time Shelter concerns itself with the European Union’s legitimacy crisis, exacerbated by the proliferation of neonationalisms that it understands through the conceit of an epidemic of memory disorders, The Camp of the Saints imagines a migratory apocalypse leading to the end of the West. The essay argues that Raspail’s and Gospodinov’s novels help readers parse out the dangers of myths about national and racial communities, shedding light on the ideological uses of memory in competing versions of the past, hence of Europe’s future.

The Political Unconscious in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam: The Post-Cold War Paradigm Shift and Morality in the Era of the Late Capitalist Market

Amsterdam opens a new phase in Ian McEwan’s writing career both for its differences from his earlier novels and short stories and for its Booker Prize success. Although the novel’s early critics designate the novel as a lightweight diversion from McEwan’s more serious subject matter, he earnestly dismisses these views and argues that while Amsterdam indeed differs from his novels written up to that point, this does not minimise the novel’s significance. This article takes up McEwan’s side in this debate in that Amsterdam is indeed a significant novel which reflects and reproduces perfectly well a post-Cold War paradigm shift in the world from a bipolar to a unipolar socio-political global order with which the previous power positions are forced, in the 1990s, to transform. McEwan’s novel reflects this socio-political transformation, and it symbolically addresses the crises of power, authority, and direction by way of creating a tension, in its narrative, between moral obligation and self-interest, where moral duty aligns with left-wing politics and self-interest with right-wing politics. This article further argues that the novel does not only reflect and reproduce that historical-political context but also, when it is interpreted using Fredric Jameson’s interpretative model for exploring texts’ political unconscious, serves as a symbolic resolution of its given historical-political moment.

Being Home in the Shelter of Time: Gospodinov’s Time Shelter

In the context of contemporary culture, nostalgia is often linked to feelings of deep yearning for home. Human’s pathological home desire and traumatic state of most individuals due to modern life result in nostalgic feelings that are often associated with the safety and coziness of home. In order to maintain such state of protection, people not only yearn for the physical state of their home but also long for the time they spent in that protected world. Their memories of the past are anchored in such space and time where they can have self-continuity, increase attachment security and boost self-esteem. Such individual memories of the past function as a shield that neutralizes the threats of the unknown present and therefore, serves as “time shelter”. The same is also true for collective memory. People tend to prefer living in specific time periods in which they are secure and feel a sense of belonging. Though this kind of longing for a specific time period can be maintained via memories, Georgi Gospodinov, a Bulgarian writer, claims it can also be physically actualized through a strong, mainstream narrative. While focusing on both the biological and sociological reasons behind people’s need and motives to forget and live in nostalgia, Georgi Gospodinov, the winner of the International Booker Prize 2023, also sheds light on how socially constructed realities, particularly “time”, can become reality once accepted collectively in his novel, Time Shelter.

Peter Carey’s “Homo Australiensis” in A Long Way from Home

The paper examines Peter Carey’s first book about Indigenous Australians, a topic which he had neglected for decades. Until A Long Way from Home (2017) was written, the two-time Booker Prize winner renowned for portraying Australian identity had yet to confront this crucial matter which he believed was a fundamental issue of the country. Reasons behind this seemingly contradictory and lengthy absence are highlighted along with certain methods with which the author gradually exposes Australia’s shameful past in the treatment of First Nations people. Carey’s approach stays true to his body of work, namely the Aboriginal subject is complemented or intertwined with his portrayal of another layer of Australia’s history: the pan-European heritage of non-Indigenous Australians. But why and in what manner does he integrate European topics into a novel aiming to shed light on the maltreatment and neglect of First Nations Australians? Does this addition not dilute the original aim of paying homage to Indigenous Australia? My paper argues that Carey successfully utilises certain European identity themes to help show the gravity of sins committed against Australian Indigenous people. The author’s modus operandi is to piece together seemingly neglected fragments of the European legacy with First Nations Australia to reveal a unified entity. Via Willie Bachhuber, a character who most Australians can connect or identify with, Carey joins together various Australian identities which may not have been connected beforehand. With this technique Carey helps ensure the novel is about and for all Australians. I believe that A Long Way from Home crowns Peter Carey’s career as fully depicting Australianness without including Aboriginal people has up until now meant a quite incomplete oeuvre. An ultimate Australian character so-far elusive to Carey, a Homo Australiensis has come to life via a pseudo-German-Balt-Hungarian-Australian, who is actually a First Nations Australian with a white biological father.

Reconstructing the Partition Hi(story): Between Sincerity and Satire in Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi)

This research paper positions Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker Prize winner Hindi-language novel Ret Samadhi (2018), translated into English Tomb of Sand (2022) by Daisy Rockwell, as a metamodern text and tries to pitch the idea that this novel redraws partition boundaries illustrated in the Indian partition literature. This novel develops postmodern irony and metafiction into David Foster Wallace’s brainchild Post-Irony and Lee Konstantinou’s idea of Credulous Metafiction to establish new sincerity in Indian partition literature. An octogenarian grandmother, Ma or Amma, wishes to visit Pakistan and eventually not only succeeds in visiting her ancestral home in Lahore but also offers a new understanding of India’s partition and boundaries between the two nations. The novel views India’s partition tragedy from a metamodern perspective of oscillation between a modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony and portrays the partition as painful as it was in past or as alleviative as it can become at present. Selfreflexive irony in the novel constantly proposes new meanings of partition trauma highlighted in Ma’s vagaries with a unique narrative strategy agglutinating the stories of modern urban life, history, folklore, environment, and womanhood with the main story. How a contemporary story on India’s partition oscillates [Vermeulen and Van Den Akkar] between modern and postmodern interpretations of displacement seeking candour and authenticity with the help of its self-referential metafiction dubbed as ‘Credulous Metafiction’ by Lee Konstantinou to locate NewSincerity [Adam Kelly] in partition literature is the major point discussed in this paper.

On Courting India

Nandini Das, winner of the British Academy Book Prize 2023, discusses her experience of writing her prize-winning book Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023). Courting India offers a fascinating history of Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the Mughal Empire, and his four years in India (1615–19), a mission generally judged to be a failure, with Roe failing to make much headway in securing diplomatic relations or trade agreements. Roe did, however, leave an extensive account of his time in India in the form of a journal, which has proved helpful in reconstructing the nature of his encounter with the Mughal court. The Mughal emperor, Jahangir, and his courtiers, seem to have had little interest in Roe, who was regarded as something of an exotic curiosity or an irrelevance. This ground-breaking book provides an insider’s view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. At an event held at the British Academy in January 2024, Professor Das discussed the book with Professor Charles Tripp FBA, chair of the Book Prize panel of judges.

Analysis of Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse from the Perspective of Ethical Literary Criticism

The Lighthouse is an excellent contemporary novel that tells the family tragedies of two generations which involve numerous individuals and families. After being shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, it has been noticed by many researchers and scholars from home and abroad. Starting from the perspective of ethical literary criticism, this paper intends to have a detailed analysis of the ethical issues existing in The Lighthouse through the method of close reading. This paper also attempts to have an insight into the moral and ethical problems in modern families, or the problems between contemporary people, trying to analyze the main characters’ self-developments of morality and the author’s ethical values from the discussion of the main characters’ ethical choices, the construction of ethical identities and the human and human relationship in this novel.

A Thematic Interpretation of Selected Novels Of Tim O Brien

Author from the United States who enlisted in the military during the Vietnam War. “The majority of his works are about Vietnam during the conflict, and his latter works often investigate the life of Vietnam soldiers after the war. O'Brien is perhaps most known for his book, which was published in 1990 and titled The Things They Carried. This book is a compilation of connected semi-autobiographical tales that were inspired by O'Brien's experiences during the war. The latter was referred to be " a masterpiece of modern war fiction" by The New York Times in the year 2010. Going For Cacciato, O'Brien's book about the conflict that was published in 1978 and won the National Book Prize, is another reason for the author's widespread reputation. In spite of the fact that O'Brien is most known for his writings on the Vietnam War, he is also highly regarded as a teacher and instructor of creative writing. From 2003 to 2012, he was the holder of an endowed chair in the Master of Fine Arts programme at Texas State University–San Marcos. The purpose of this article is to provide thematic interpretations on a selection of Tim O'Brien's works.”

On Violence Writing in Ian McEwan’s Saturday

Ian McEwan is one of the most preeminent contemporary British writers. His masterpiece Saturday is longlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize. Revolving around the protagonist Perowne’s one-day life, the novel portrays a realistic picture of British society after the “9·11” terrorist attack. So far, scholars have interpreted Saturday from the perspective of space, trauma, intertextuality, culture, and ethics, while few studies have touched upon the violence writing in this novel. Therefore, this paper will explore the manifestations and roots of direct, structural and cultural violence in Saturday based on Johan Galtung’s violence triangle theory. The study of violence writing in the novel can reveal not only hidden violence problems in British society but also McEwan’s appeal for a harmonious society. Meanwhile, the solution to violence issues McEwan provides in the novel is also instructive for modern people to cope with violence dilemmas.

How supranational literary prizes shape translation flows

Abstract This article explores how literary prizing shapes translation flows by comparing bibliographic data on the translations of prize-winning books. It focuses on two prizes in particular, the Booker Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL), both of which generate significant numbers of translations but for very different reasons. The article develops the idea of ‘prizing logics’ to help explain these differences, singling out factors that appear to play a role: (1) the prize’s translation policy (especially important for the EUPL) and (2) the prize’s prestige and focus on commercial success (particularly relevant for the Booker). It shows that translations of EUPL winners are largely a result of state support, which is linked to the prize’s aim of spreading European diversity and reinforcing unity through literature, while the Booker is more focused on literary quality and stimulating commercial success, thereby leading to many translations of its winners.

Capitalist political economy and the political economy of capitalisms: 2022 Rik Davidson/Studies in Political Economy Book Prize

In 2022, Heather Whiteside of the University of Waterloo was recognized with the Rik Davidson/Studies in Political Economy Book Prize for her book Capitalist Political Economy: Thinkers and Theories (Routledge, 2020). This article is an edited version of the book prize talk that she delivered at the Canadian Political Science Association’s 2023 Annual Meeting, held at York University in Toronto. Professor Whiteside summarizes the book briefly and presents some recent works on the political economy of capitalisms, specifically regarding proprietary settler colonialism and Coast Salish capitalism.