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John Banville: could I win the Booker Prize now as a straight, white male?

John Banville - Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
John Banville - Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

John Banville, winner of the 2005 Booker Prize, has suggested that he could not win it now because he is a straight, white male.

The Irish author decried the “woke movement” and likened it to a religious cult.

He won the Booker Prize with The Sea, the tale of a retired art historian who returned to the village where he had spent a childhood holiday.

Asked during an interview for the Hay Festival Winter Weekend if it would be possible for someone like him to win the prize now at a time of “woke suspicion about white, straight men”, Banville replied: “I would not like to be starting out now, certainly. It’s very difficult.

“I despise this ‘woke’ movement. Why were they asleep for so long? The same injustices were going on. It’s become a religious cult. You see people kneeling in the street, holding up their fists - that’s not going to do anything for black people.”

Last year, the Booker Prize was split between two women, Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo. This year’s winner, Shuggie Bain, was written by Douglas Stuart.

Stuart wrote about his childhood in 1980s Glasgow, where he grew up with his alcoholic mother. The author, now resident in New York, told the Telegraph after his win: “People sometimes want to know if I am a Scottish writer or an American writer, or a working class writer or a gay writer, but the truth is I am all of those things and hopefully a few other things too.”

When Banville accepted the prize in 2005, he said in his speech: “It’s nice to see a work of art winning the Booker Prize.” It split critical opinion, with the chair of the judges, John Sutherland, calling it “a masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected”, and the New York Times branding it “stilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious”.

Banville also writes crime novels under a pen name, Benjamin Black. He recently published his latest whodunnit, Snow.

Although it is concerned with a murder, Banville said he was appalled by the increasingly graphic nature of violence in other writers’ crime books. “I don’t want to go back to the Agatha Christie thing where someone gets shot but there’s no blood, but the glory in slaughter - I’m speechless,” he said.