On the 23rd of September, the Booker Prize shortlist was announced at a public event for the first time. Since its inception in 1969, the jury’s shortlist for the coveted award has typically been unveiled at a private party, but the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall was selected to play host this time around. According to Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, the motivation behind this new incarnation is to encourage people to “read and discuss great fiction,” and to “pull back the curtain” on the process of awarding the prize. It’s worth noting that the attendance of Sarah Jessica Parker as a member of the jury no doubt increased the foundation’s confidence in attendance figures, and thus the viability of the event. All this, it seemed, was principally to cultivate the visibility of an extra-textual ecosystem around long-form fiction, so as to raise interest and increase engagement.

The event took the form of a round-table discussion between Gaby Wood and the jury, covering how entries were selected, thoughts on the books, and reflections on the experience. This was interspersed with pastel videos of the ‘longlisted’ books piled up with sofa-advert muzak in the background. Two comments made during the event were of particular interest. First, when jury-member Chris Power made a reference to recommending books to other “readers”. The term evoked a community construction, similar to ‘gamers’ or ‘film-buffs’, bridging the gap between the novel and what one might habitually class as ‘media’. Second was Gaby Wood’s description of the interlude videos as “content” when thanking their creators.

“These moments forced a consideration of what exactly the difference is between art, media, and content”

These moments forced a consideration of what exactly the difference is between art, media, and content, and where the Prize understands the novel to sit in relation to each. For the purposes of this argument, I offer the following tentative definitions of each category. Art: too large to properly define, but broadly an austere term that recognises serious creative activity. Media: while one might vehemently defend Marvel movies as ‘art’ in a smoking-area debate (even if we don’t like them), terms like ‘media studies’ and ‘media literacy’ betray us, highlighting our collective reticence to incorporate them wholesale into the term ‘art’. ‘Media’ functions as a sub-space carved out for such cases. Content: the rest of it. What we use to make our brains feel full. Fodder for the dopamine cycle.

The novel’s position here is complicated. The roots of the English novel are in the journalistic artifice of Daniel Defoe and Aphra Behn. These works presented themselves in a form very similar to newspaper stories; a form we would consider ‘media’. From the late 18th century onwards, and especially during the height of modernism, a properly artistic novel emerged from whence almost the entire novelistic canon hails. Even so, the literary historian Franco Moretti has recognised a “division of labour” such that literary and mass-media fiction continued to co-exist (Distant Reading). To the present day, divisions remain between writers like Margaret Atwood and those like Dan Brown. That is to say, the novel is a contested space and is therefore susceptible to several interests.

In principle, the Booker Prize exists to recognise literary excellence (read: the artistic), but in its structure and effects, the Prize is a marketing endeavour. Its name is given by its first sponsor, Booker Group Limited, which is now a subsidiary of Tesco plc. Further, the 2024 winner, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, enjoyed a 3,000% sales boost. This pulls it closer to mass-media award ceremonies like the Oscars, BAFTAs, and Emmys, a link only strengthened by the new public format. From my perspective, many of the books recognised this year are properly artistic and formally orientated. I’d cite Katie Kitamura’s Audition and Maria Reva’s Endling as salient examples. But, the Prize itself seems intent on pulling the ‘media’, so to speak, out of them. They are readied for purchase by a fandom of ‘readers’ at the Foyles pop-up shop in the lobby. These readers are all-the-while kept engaged by a steady outpouring of content, which the event itself is part of.

“Is the goal here to save the novel from itself?”

The jury recognised the “Booker effect” on a writer’s career, and the “responsibility” that gave them. I am compelled to ask if this affected how they read the novels. It could be that viewing something as art, media or content is really a function of our mode of engagement. Are you encountering the object as a critic, with an eye for form and artistry; a ‘reader’, belonging to a mass-media fandom; or a consumer, chasing the next dopamine hit? In other words, the formal conceit of Audition is but an irrelevance if all you are reading for is its market trajectory. The new format requires us to ask which type of encounter the Prize is pushing us to have.

This is not an argument about what the Booker Prize should or shouldn’t be. Nor is it an endorsement of any hierarchy of entertainment. Rather, my intent is a sober interrogation of things as they actually are. In terms of economic efficiency, the hierarchy is certainly content, media, and then art. In terms of lasting value, the order is certainly reversed. This is part of what defines them. There are contradictory interests in play, and the Booker Prize Foundation is part of a publishing industry whose interests lean towards the economic.

In response to a crisis of readership, has the litworld resolved to transmute the novel into a form of media proper and bathe it in a sea of content? Podcasts, online quizzes, extracts, videos, etc. Is the goal here to save the novel from itself? If so, the ‘long-form fiction’ for which the prize is awarded is forced to decompose itself into consumable, short-form chunks – submitting itself to the torrential cascade: Content. Content. Content.