Should American authors be allowed in the Booker Prize

Very much against it - it reduces my chances. Ha!

Get clued up, Funky - you'd like him.

Are we not missing a point here? Surely the judges decide on the winner. And if you can't cut it, don't write it.

I'm not so sure about the Philip Roth thing, but it's obvious that opening it up to authors from such a big place will reduce the chances of UK authors, just by virtue of statistics if nothing else. Maybe if they limited it to U.S. authors who no longer live in the U.S. (ahem). :))) Funny about Roth. He is one of the best known American authors, everyone has heard of Portnoy's Complain (just mention the words and people snicker), yet I've never met anyone who has actually read one of the books, and even I had never read one until a few weeks ago when I read The Human Stain. It is wonderful, by the way, and is evidently being made into a movie with Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris.

Don't see a problem here, but and it's a big but, all British authors should be allowed to enter their competitions. Is it not true that the Americans love British authors because we are better writers? So if you are good is it not a better prize, when you can win over more rather than less?

I've never heard of Philip Roth

I was a bit surprised to find his books all over the place in the U.K. myself, actually. On the other hand, I was recently surprised to learn that Ian McEwan is well known in the U.S. It's a similar thing, though they are very different writers. One of Roth's books, Goodbye Columbus, was made into a very funny movie in the early 70s.

I only know of him because I spent all last week trying to find which section of Smiths fiction he was in so I could move him to another section. He was modern and got moved to literary (you all care). But surely all writing is literary?

I suppose it's the same as most things literary, you know about it if you read the broadsheets. I've got a fair knowledge of 'literary' stuff, having read the reviews section of the saturday Guardian and the Observer books on Sunday for about 7 years. Therefore, I know who Philip Roth is and have an idea of what books he's written. The words 'tiny bubble' spring to mind, all this is important if you write books that are reviewed in broadsheets, or read the reviews of books that are reviewed in broadsheets. In reality, this is a minority of the book buying public. 'the literary world' and 'tiny bubble' seem fairly interchangable. The issue that seems to me to be important is the exposure of good writers, of which there is not enough full stop. Whether or not the Booker is open to American writers seems to me to be a storm in the broadsheets. The issue isn't individual prizes or competitions, but exposure and the breaking out of the 'tiny bubble', into mainstream readership.

Now that I think about it, Roth is very much a Booker kind of guy. At the risk of being accused of self-promotion (someone else brought up Roth, not me), I wrote a (somewhat half-baked) review of Human Stain, which is in my review section.

I'd be firmly against it - at least at the moment the Booker gets a spread of nominees writing in different styles and ideas. Opening it up to the American heavyweights sadly means that we'd get six finalists all writing labouring fiction about the 'human condition' - by which they mean the condition of the middle-aged, well-educated, well-off white American male. (I don't condemn all American fiction this way, but American 'highbrow' fiction does all seem very earnest and narrow in scope. Even DeLillo, who was praised to the skies for Underworld in literary circles, even godamn it compared favourably to Moby Dick - sorry, it was a novel about a freaking baseball!) Isn't there a Pulitzer Prize for American writers? Anyone knew any recent winner of that? Other than maybe Richard Ford for Independence Day, which I'm sure won and was bought because people mistook it for a movie-tie-in.

No

I'm against it myself, but I would think that if they do open it up, surely the nominating board should be able to control it. And why would the American books win anyway? Most of the American authors who might be Booker types are dead.