Two of the UK’s big culture prizes were announced this week. In music, there was a general buzz of approval as the rapper and actor Little Simz took the Mercury with her fourth album, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. In the literary arena, reactions were more mixed as this year’s Booker prize was awarded to a second novel by the Sri Lankan novelist Shehan Karunatilaka.
The surprise and, in some quarters, disappointment provoked by the Booker result was not predominantly because the prize’s armchair jurists had read Karunatilaka’s book and found it wanting (up until the announcement, only 4,333 copies had been sold in the UK, according to the industry analysts Nielsen BookScan). It was because, without being that exciting thing – a debut writer – he is a literary outsider, and it’s in the nature of the showboating around the Booker that everyone scraps for a novel they already know.
