"Lost Booker" will honor best work from missing year, 1970

In 1971, in an effort to increase the timeliness of the award, the Man Booker Prize rules committee adjusted its pool of eligible nominees to include contenders only from the current publication year. Since its inception only a few years prior, the award had recognized books published in the previous year.

As a result of the nomination shuffle, the books published in 1970 were never eligible for the prestigious prize. Almost forty years later, the Man Booker Prize will bestow a special "Lost Booker" upon one of six contenders who would have likely been nominated that year: Patrick White (Australia) for The Vivesector, Shirley Hazzard (GB/US/Australia) for The Bay of Noon, Muriel Spark (Scotland) for The Driver's Seat, Mary Renault (GB) for Fire From Heaven, Nina Bawden (GB) for The Birds on the Trees, and J.G. Farrell (GB) for Trouble. Only Bawden and Hazzard are still alive.

A popular vote through April 23 on the Man Booker website will determine the winner, who will be announced on May 19.

James Kelman argues against Scottish genre fiction

Citing the bestselling Harry Potter novels of J.K. Rowling and detective pageturners of Ian Rankin, James Kelman has accused popular genre fiction writers of warping the world's perception of Scottish literature. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Kelman--who is Scotland's only Booker Prize winner--said that the success of "mediocre" writers has overshadowed the more talented output of literary authors and has turned Scotland into a factory that churns out conventional fiction for mass consumption.

Kelman's remarks have, of course, been met with much derision from both writers of such fiction--who question the ability of so-called "literary writers" to produce enjoyable stories--and readers, who often enjoy gripping yet "easy" tales. Neither is the divide restricted to Scotland fiction; the United States, for instance, has its own distinction between the Dan Browns and Clive Cusslers and the Philip Roths and Thomas Pynchons of the book universe.

Kelman's How Late it Was, How Late, which won the Booker in 1994, met its own share of scorn and criticism, with one judge threatening to resign and critics labeling it "crap" and "literary vandalism." The stream-of-consciousness novel is written in a working class dialect of Glasgow and follows a few days in the life of an uneducated ex-convict.

The Guardian offers an excellent examination of Kelman's remarks:

As a manifestation of the old 'genre v real literature' chestnut, the debate should be just as interesting to those outside of Scotland. Kelman, committed to experimental form and language, sees genre fiction as redundant, compromised by commerciality. Mina, while still calling Kelman a "beautiful writer", regards his stance as a mere "play for status"; a failure of the writer's duty to entertain.

There is another to level to this, however, about the ways in which any country's indigenous literature – especially those of smaller or post-colonial nations – is threatened by the commercial imperative to produce page-turning, airport-friendly thrillers. A third level concerns the collusion of the literary establishment in this. It's certainly the case that the books editors of broadsheet newspapers will bemoan the fact that we're not all reading Tolstoy, while providing acres of coverage to crime writers. Genre fiction doesn't need highbrow attention in order to sell by the bucketload, yet editors must cover it precisely because it is so visible. This crowds out more risk-taking writers, for whom a single review from a perceptive critic can provide a career breakthrough.

It is galling, then, that a country like Scotland, home to an enormous, bristling, experimental tradition which includes James Hogg, Alexander Trocchi, Hugh McDiarmid, Muriel Spark, Edwin Morgan, Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, James Robertson and Kelman himself, is marketed to tourists as the home of Rebus and Potter.

Irish novelist pens biography of Byron

Edna O'Brien has written a new biography exploring the personal life of nineteenth-century English poet Lord Byron, entitled Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life.

Heller McAlpin of the Christian Science Monitor writes:

O’Brien, a passionate, iconoclastic writer herself – her early, sexually frank “Country Girls” novels were banned and burned in her native Ireland when they first appeared in the 1960s – is well suited to her subject. She has pored over reams of Byron’s letters and journals and digested Leslie A. Marchand’s 1957 three-volume “Life of Byron” to present a vivid portrait of the man whom Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his scores of jilted lovers, called “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

As captured by O’Brien, Byron was at once brilliant, magnetic, and monstrous – an arrogant son; an insatiable seducer of both sexes; an incestuous adulterer; a spendthrift; a wildly original, popular, and vilified poet; a cruel and neglectful father; a passionate traveler; and a generous friend. He idolized Napoleon and loved Greece.

O’Brien notes, “The word Byronic, to this day, connotes excess, diabological deeds and a rebelliousness answering neither to king nor commoner. Byron, more than any other poet, has come to personify the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless.”