The Booker in the Nineties

In this mass media glare of the 90s Booker,  there’s evidence here and there of yet more self-consciousness on the part of the rotating panel of judges. There’s the occasional tendency to try to replicate old success stories, which more often than not falls flat. Experimentation happens here and there, welcome when it does, however successful. We start to get a firmer sense of “Booker type” novels, leading to a sense of exhaustion with some of the winners. More importantly, the sense that many of those “Booker type” novels come from the pens of a certain “Booker type” author (white, middle class, overwhelmingly male) can no longer be ignored.