Not for the first time, a Man Booker prize has sparked a spat. It seems Carmen Callil, author and founder of feminist publishers Virago, quit the judging panel of the Man Booker International prize on the eve of the announcement that this year's award was going to Philip Roth. The American author of Portnoy's Complaint, American Pastoral and The Human Stain "goes on and on about the same subject in almost every book," Callil complained. "It's as though he's sitting on your face . . . I don't rate him as a writer at all."
The row is nothing new to one of her two fellow judges, rare book dealer and author Rick Gekoski, who as a judge of the 2005 Man Booker (which honours a single novel, rather than a writer's body of work) had to defend his passionate and unwavering support for the controversial winner, John Banville's The Sea – especially when it emerged that half the panel did not agree with him, and only chairman John Sutherland's vote could break the deadlock.
The Man Booker, founded in 1968, is no stranger to controversy. As early as 1971, Malcolm Muggeridge resigned from the judging panel because "most of the entries seem to me to be mere pornography, and to lack any literary qualities or distinction which could possibly compensate for the unsavouriness of their contents". That year also witnessed a bitter argument about whether the eventual winner, VS Naipaul's In a Free State, was a novel at all. Then, in 1974, judge Elizabeth Jane Howard shortlisted a novel by her husband, Kingsley Amis.
And Callil's verdict on Roth is tame compared with those of one early judge, Rebecca West, who dismissed Ann Quin's Passages as "unbearable", Brigid Brophy's In Transit as "twaddle" and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman as "a foolish enterprise . . . worked out with very little talent".
