Is the white male novelist disappearing?
“Women Dominate Shortlist for International Booker Prize,” reads the headline of Alex Marshall’s Thursday article for the New York Times. He notes that five of the six books on the shortlist this year were written by women. The novels do look interesting — I haven’t read Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob or Jon Fosse’s latest in his New Name series and want to pick up both — but it’s hardly news that women “dominate” the International Booker. They have dominated every major literary prize in the last few years. Four of the last six winners of the International Booker have been women. While winners of the Booker (not the International Booker) over the last six years are split right down the middle, women outnumber men twenty-two to fourteen on the shortlist.
