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<\/p>\nThe Booker prize jury chair has bemoaned the quality of many entrants for the annual literary award, saying judges had often wondered \u201cwhy we had been asked to read\u201d some of the submitted novels.<\/p>\n
Roddy Doyle, the first former Booker prizewinner to subsequently chair the jury, said he and the other four jurors had discarded all but 31 books from the original 153 to discuss before deciding which should be on their longlist.<\/p>\n
He said many had not warranted discussion later, adding that he began to feel low when reading two bad books in a row because he had \u201csigned up\u201d to be a judge in order to read good books.<\/p>\n
There are regularly more than 150 \u201cliterary fiction\u201d titles in contention for the prize. New novels by all previously shortlisted authors are entered automatically, and some publishing houses are allowed several entries each depending on previous success.<\/p>\n
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The American writer Susan Choi is on the shortlist<\/p>\n
HEATHER WESTON<\/p>\n
The expansion a decade ago of the prize \u2014 which was previously open \u00adonly to British, Commonwealth and Irish writers \u2014 to admit books by any novelist writing in English has also led to a vast number of submissions from American authors.<\/p>\n
Doyle said the number of books they all had to read was \u201cdaunting\u201d. He said that such were his reading responsibilities, one day he recorded only 17 steps on his pedometer \u201cand it took eight steps to the kettle from where I was sitting\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Who will win the 2025 Booker prize?<\/a><\/p>\n He said that before a longlisting meeting with the other judges \u2014 the fellow writers Ayobami Adebayo and Kiley Reid, the critic Chris Power and the actress Sarah Jessica Parker \u2014 they had \u201cdecided 31 books were worth discussing\u201d.<\/p>\n Although they had talked about each of the 153 submitted novels, he said: \u201cWe didn\u2019t say much about some of them and a very few we wondered why we had been asked to read them.\u201d<\/p>\n Power said the bad books did have the benefit of highlighting the good ones. \u201cIf you read a few bad books in a row, which you could easily do in this process or [at least] not great books and then you read something quite good you suddenly got excited about it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Power said that under the judges\u2019 \u201ctraffic light system\u201d, green for good and red for bad, red could mean that a book was \u201cfine, just not something that you really think is worth pushing into the hands of readers\u201d.<\/p>\n
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