Bob Dylan is now a literary celebrity. And next week, the Booker Prize judges will anoint another. The tag is still chiefly attached to men but women authors shouldn’t despair: fame and good writing can be uneasy bedfellows.
Marlon James won the Booker Prize this week with a book that focuses on the unrest and violence of 1970s Jamaica, a troubled chapter that continues to shape the island nation’s present - and its future.
The book prize is the publisher’s answer to the persistent grumble that fiction is in its death throes; an attempt to combat the perceived threat of the digital.
Framing younger writers’ work within the footsteps of giants is always fraught with risk; the risk of shadowing the merits and faults of the former in an attempt to assess the legacy of the latter.