230615 The Man Booker Prize (S) (SoSe 2025)

"The problem with the Man Booker Prize is the fact that it seems to be selective not just about the authors it celebrates, but about the kind of readers it wants. Judging by the prohibitively expensive festival tickets, the location of events (I’m yet to see a Man Booker event in the UK that is held outside of London) and the kind of approach to literature that the prize’s winners propagate — that there is ‘good’ reading (novels) and ‘bad’ reading (genre fiction and any form other than novels) — the Man Booker Prize is speaking to a select reader and audience. They’re wealthy, predominantly white, well-educated connoisseurs of high culture. This prize doesn’t want to bring literature into the hands of just anyone, it wants to maintain its self-engineered, self-congratulatory and self-perpetuating hierarchy of literary value. Rather than noble or fair, it is exclusionary, snobbish and classist. The Man Booker Prize doesn’t represent the best of literature, it represents the worst of pretension in literature." (Stevie Marsden for Medium: https://medium.com/@steviemarsden/why-im-done-with-the-man-booker-prize-and-you-should-be-too-ad0057b95baf)

With these justified reservations in mind, we will read and discuss together a selection of Booker Prize winners from the past few decades. - The idea is to analyse what it is that appeals to white, middle-aged, middle-class readers; the idea is also to see what we, as a more diverse group of readers, can make of novels about which there is not yet a big pile of secondary writing.

Bibliography

I choose one: Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, 2012, won the Booker in 2013. (I would choose Wolf Hall, which won in 2009, but it would only leave us time for two or three more novels, and I am aiming for five or six.)
You choose the others. Everyone reads every novel we choose.