Julian Barnes Finally Wins the Man Booker Prize

It was announced yesterday that Julian Barnes won this year's Man Booker Prize for fiction, for his novel "The Sense of an Ending." The Booker is Britain's most prestigious literary prize. I haven't read the novel yet, because it has only very recently been released in the U.S., but I plan to. Readers of this blog may remember that I have written about several of Barnes' books, and highly appreciate his work, perhaps his short stories even more than his novels. Barnes, a very well-respected writer, had been nominated three times before, so it was not a surprise that he won this time. There was, parenthetically, a bit of a kerfuffle about the judges' stating that they were looking for "readable" books, which was interpreted as not putting literary value first. This criticism was not aimed at Barnes, but at the Booker judges, and at the fact that writers such as Alan Hollinghurst and Ali Smith were not shortlisted this year. There is talk that a group of British writers and publishers plan to set up a new Literature Prize "where the single criterion is excellence rather than other factors," as Andrew Kidd, spokesman for the proposed new prize, puts it. One difference from the Booker will be that any English-language writer whose work has been published in Britain will be eligible, unlike the Booker, which does not give the prize to Americans. We shall see if the Literary Prize will actually be set up, and if it becomes as prestigious as the Booker Prize is now. (Thanks to the AP and to the Guardian UK for some of this information.) In any case, back to Julian Barnes: I congratulate him on his well deserved (if this new book is anything like his earlier books) win.