How do we judge literary excellence?
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| A sketch of the British Museum Reading Room |
Dan Hartley has written a post on the recent Booker Prize controversy over at his blog,
Thinking Blue Guitars: 'This year the Booker judges have caused a stir by claiming they are selecting books with ‘readability’ over those with ‘quality’. Predictably, this has caused a backlash amongst the literati: why, asks Andrew Motion, should readability be assumed to be different in kind from quality? To raise a false opposition between the two is ‘a pernicious and a dangerous thing’. Likewise, literary agent, Andrew Kidd, has announced he will be launching a new literary prize, one whose sole criterion is ‘excellence’.' [
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