http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/21/man-booker-international-carmen-callil?CMP=twt_fd
Carmen Callil: Why I quit the Man Booker International panel
'To give this prize to yet another North American writer suggests a limited vision, to say the least'
Carmen Callil. Photograph: Rex Features
As one of the three judges for the 2011 Man Booker International Prize for Fiction, announced on 18 May, I have spent the past 18 months tracking down writers from all over the world. The requirements of the prize are that the winner should be living, and that their fiction should be published either originally, or in translation, in English. The prize is not awarded for any particular novel, but for the writer's achievement in fiction. This brief provided me with the opportunity to read hundreds of novels, to ferret out writers I had never heard of before, and to spend months contemplating other cultures, histories, love stories, lives, the most exciting reading I have done for many a year. The winner of the 2011 prize of £60,000 was announced in Sydney on Wednesday: Philip Roth.
My objections to this outcome are many. The international aspect of this prize is its critical difference: to search out and value other voices. This was especially important to me because I believe that we live in times when English-speaking readers need – and want – the access that speakers of other languages have to such books: fewer writers are translated into English than into any other language.
I imagined the prize would, while including English-speaking writers of course, want to celebrate the work of translation and of translators who so widen our understanding of other countries, other cultures.
The Man Booker International prize allows for a separate prize for translation. If applicable, the winner can choose a translator of his or her work into English to receive a prize of £15,000. Of the four awards given thus far, only one has been given to an author not writing in English, the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadaré. And now, with the choice of Roth, this money continues unused. I hope the sum is accumulating.
I did considerable research into the writers of China, Africa, India, Pakistan, the Arab World, Sri Lanka, the Caribbean and more. We read novelists ranging through well-known and lesser known writers from Europe, South America, the US, Asia, Israel, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
So, to give this prize to yet another North American writer, when we had such great writers to choose from (the previous winner was the truly great Canadian writer, Alice Munro) suggests a limited vision, to say the least.
This is not a matter of nationality. You can't group writers into teams or competitions like the World Cup or the Ashes. The essential matter is the quality of the writer, the body of work achieved and its value to the rest of the world.
There are great moments in Roth's work. He is clever, harsh, comic, but his reach is narrow. Not in the Austen, Bellow or Updike sense, because they use a narrow canvas to convey the widest concepts and ideas. Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist. And so he uses a big canvas to do small things, and yet his small things take up oceanic room. The more I read, the more tedious I found his work, the more I heard the swish of emperor's clothes.
Hard to admire him, hard to see him on the long list, hard to award him this international prize. But I could have done it – after all, I am used to the mysteries of other people's tastes – had it not been for the following: during the past 18 months favourite writers of each of us bit the dust because one or other of the three judges did not care for them, did not think them fine novelists. Each judge was in the same position, of course, vis à vis some of the finalists.
There were 13 writers on our final list. Any other of the 13 would have been exciting choices for the readers for whom judges work. Any other of the 13 would have been acceptable to me. I have judged many prizes, and compromise has always been necessary. There is a form of compromise when a second choice, acceptable to all judges, is agreed on. This was not the procedure followed and under these circumstances I could not lend my name to the choice of Roth, so I retired from the judging panel.
In retrospect I realise that I should not have capitulated and should have asked for a reassessment and full discussion of each of the other finalists. The depth of humanity, all those different qualities one looks for in great writing are represented in huge measure among them. This puff of indignation is for them, and for the translators who labour in the vineyard on behalf of many of those on the list – not always successfully, but for all who read in the English language. Reading their work so extensively has been a great gift (and could be for others) and for this I shall always be grateful to Man Booker.
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