On Tuesday, the Booker’s organisers altered the wording of a piece about McConnell’s links to slavery after Brave criticised it on X.
The Booker Prize has been called out for its unpaid debts to the colonised. Like several cultural artefacts that mark the Anglophone world’s kinship with liberal values, one of the most generous purses in the English literary firmament, has inherited the contradictions of an imperial system built on slavery and racism. Earlier this week, popular radio host Richie Brave suggested that Booker should consider changing its name because of its links to exploitation of plantation workers in the Caribbean.
The lineage of the Prize’s original sponsor, the wholesale food distributor Booker McConnell goes back to Josias and George Booker who first made a fortune in Guyana and then received a hefty compensation — for 52 slaves — after the British empire abolished slavery in the 1830s. On Tuesday, the Booker’s organisers altered the wording of a piece about McConnell’s links to slavery after Brave criticised it on X.
The radio host who traces his ancestry to a family enslaved by the Booker brothers objected to a sentence which said that George and Josias “managed” nearly 200 enslaved people. “They did not manage. George and Josias enslaved my family… I hope that Booker will start asking themselves some questions around the name,” he wrote.
Ritchie was echoing a criticism made frequently in the early years of the Prize’s history. In his acceptance speech in 1972, the Prize’s fourth winner, John Berger lambasted the sponsor and said that the poverty of the Caribbean was a direct result of the extractive ways of the plantation owners. Since then the Booker story has acquired many layers, including the stinging satire on segregation and racism by its 2016 winner Paul Beatty. The award will, of course, always carry the weight of its past. But, what is history without dialectics? And, what is literature sanitised of contradictions? These are questions those administering one of literature’s most prestigious prizes, and their critics, must reckon with.
