My fellow authors are too busy chasing prizes to write about what matters | Amit Chaudhuri
What we read is now defined by the market, as the views of Booker prize judges carry more weight than the need for originality and innovation
There are at least two reasons why almost every anglophone novelist feels compelled to get as near the Booker prize as they can. The first is because it looms over them and follows them around in the way Guy de Maupassant said the Eiffel Tower follows you everywhere when you’re in Paris. “To escape the Eiffel Tower,” Maupassant suggested, “you have to go inside it.” Similarly, the main reason for a novelist wanting to win the Booker prize is to no longer be under any obligation to win it, and to be able to get on with their job: writing, and thinking about writing.
The other reason is that the Booker prize is most literary publishers’ primary marketing tool. There are relatively few Diana
