Our weekly edit

In the world of the Booker this week: we explore the prize's criminal side, the countdown to the International Booker Prize 2023 begins, plus our favourite Booker love stories

How crime fiction crept up on the Booker longlist

For decades, Booker-nominated authors have been tangled up in crime. But why, asks Michael Prodger, has a traditional crime novel never won the prize?

Over the course of its 54-year history, the Booker Prize has become the focus of strong opinions - and opinions breed criticism. One of the most consistent reproaches aimed at the prize is that no crime novel has ever won. The inference being that the judges - more than 240 of them over the years - have consistently ignored the most popular form of fiction for reasons of snobbery and literary elitism, as if wilfully determined to keep innumerable readers at arm’s length. The prize, the complaint went, was for what used to be called literary fiction only.

While that term has faded from common usage as the understanding has spread that definitions and genres are too often restrictive or ill-defined and that novels are multifarious things that can traverse many areas at once, the adherents of crime writing still regularly air their grievance. They point to the fact that such significant authors as P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Mark Billingham, Mo Hayder, Robert Galbraith and Mick Herron have never been longlisted. Nor, since the prize was opened up to writers from around the world in 2014, have any of the big-name Americans, the likes of Jeffery Deaver and James Patterson. 

In 2018, Snap by Belinda Bauer was longlisted for the Booker. The fact that Bauer, a winner of both the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award and the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award, had been nominated for what seemed to be an orthodox crime novel – about a boy who sets out to discover his mother’s murderer – was seen as highly unusual. Bauer herself recalled getting ‘some flak on Twitter… “How dare Belinda Bauer think she can be on this longlist?” That sort of thing.’ 

However, the Booker Prize has in fact long been tangled up in crime. Although there is some truth to the crime aficionados’ accusation, it really only applies to the Booker Prize’s early decades when cultural categories were more fixed. From the 1990s onwards, crime fiction, or at least books in which crime is a prime motivator, have made regular appearances on the longlists and shortlists.  

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The countdown to the International Booker Prize 2023 begins

In less than a month’s time, on Tuesday, March 14, the longlist for the International Booker Prize 2023 will be announced. The 12 or 13 works of fiction will be chosen by this year’s panel, chaired by French-Moroccan novelist Leïla Slimani. Slimani’s fellow judges include Uilleam Blacker, one of Britain’s leading literary translators from Ukrainian; Tan Twan Eng, the Booker-shortlisted Malaysian novelist; Parul Sehgal, staff writer and critic at the New Yorker; and Frederick Studemann, Literary Editor of the Financial Times.

We caught up with the judges to ask what they're hoping to find among this year's submissions - and why reading fiction from other cultures matters. If there’s a translated fiction title you’d like to see on this year’s longlist, let us know in the comments.

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In case you missed it: the best love stories in Booker-nominated books

Writers have been using the universal connection of love to explore the human condition since they first put pen to paper. So, in the spirit of Valentine’s Day earlier this week, we’ve compiled a list of novels featuring the most memorable relationships - from the will-they-won’t-they of first loves to the suppressed desire of what might have been, these books celebrate love in all its heartbreaking glory.

And finally…

Your last chance to vote for the name of the Booker Prize trophy. Will it be Bernie, Iris, Beryl, Minerva, Calliope or Janina?

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