American wins Man Booker Prize for Fiction

LONDON — Paul Beatty became the first U.S. author to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize on Tuesday.

Beatty’s The Sellout, a satirical look at race relations in the United States, garnered the 50,000-pound ($61,000) Man Booker Prize, which was previously open only to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, partly over fears of potential American dominance. (The Commonwealth is an alliance of countries that used to be part of the British Empire.)

Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, a character study set in small-town America, another book written by a U.S. national, was also in the final running for the prize. The final field included six novels.

The award is open to any author, writing originally in English and whose book is published in the United Kingdom, irrespective of nationality. The six-book shortlist has been whittled down from 155 novels by five judges who are reported to read a book a day for six months. The victor usually sees a huge boost in sales and profile. This year, three Britons, two Americans and a Canadian are vying for the prize.

Beatty will receive the prize from Prince Charles’ wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, during a ceremony at London’s medieval Guildhall. Previous winners include Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Hilary Mantel. In 2015, the winner was Marlon James for A Brief History of Seven Killings, a book that revolves around an attempt to assassinate musician Bob Marley in 1976. James was the first Jamaican author to win the prize.

"The impact is downright seismic. It does change your status as a writer and the money is fantastic," James told Reuters in a recent interview. "It does have an immense impact on sales. (A Brief History of Seven Killings) made the top five of the New York Times bestseller list, which I don't think it would have before."

This year, bookmaker Ladbrokes has made Canada’s Madeleine Thien the favorite with Do Not Say We Have Nothing, the story of two families roiled by China’s tumultuous 20th-century history. The other contenders are Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Scottish murder story His Bloody Project; Deborah Levy’s tale of mother-child trauma Hot Milk; and All That Man Is, a portrait of masculinity in a fragmented Europe by Canadian-born British novelist David Szalay.

The prize was expanded in 2014 to include entrants from the broader English-speaking world. Last year, David Godwin, a British literary agent, told Britain's Telegraph newspaper it was "absolutely tragic" that Americans were permitted to seek the accolade, a highlight of the British literary calendar received with great fanfare.

"The Booker prize was established to celebrate British and Commonwealth writers but they are the real casualties here," he said. "They have been overwhelmed. Its nature has changed dramatically and the consequences are really tragic. There was absolutely no need to change the rules. None of the major American prizes are open to Brits."

The prize's organizers say they changed the entry rules to ensure global relevance.

Earlier this month, U.S. singer and songwriter Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the first American to be awarded one of the world's top literary honors since Toni Morrison in 1993. However, Dylan's failure to publicly acknowledge the achievement has rankled some members of the Nobel committee.

Hjelmgaard reported from Berlin.