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.
You might have thought that the world’s most prestigious prize for fiction was a level playing field. In fact, rule changes have made it much easier for big publishers to dominate.