Paradoxically, the judges of the 2013 Women's prize for fiction have been brave in choosing a rather predictable shortlist, headed by, you guessed it, Hilary Mantel. No prize list these days is complete without Mantel, who has won the Man Booker twice (for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies), as well as the 2012 Costa book of the year for the second part of her Tudor trilogy. It is brave because it feels repetitive: the news becomes the fact that there is no news.
Miranda Richardson, chair of judges for the Women's prize (formerly known as the Orange prize), got her retaliation in first at Tuesday's shortlist announcement. "I was very keen to keep a balanced approach about Hilary Mantel," she said, "because we have in the UK this tall-poppy syndrome: 'You've already had too much; you can't have any more. Go away and die now.' It's disgusting, frankly, because this competition is about excellence for writing."
Richardson is right and wrong at the same time. She is right that the chatterati don't want Mantel to win again, and would prefer a self-published first novel by a 93-year-old living in a croft in Clackmannanshire. That would be a front-page story rather than a dutiful page 28 number. But she is wrong to read too much into it. The book industry itself seems to have no qualms about Mantel being in the frame for the umpteenth time.
"I haven't met anybody in publishing or bookselling who thinks there should be a limit to the number of prizes an author can win," says Jon Howells of Waterstone's. "The reason awards like this have been around for as long as they have is that they have integrity. Their job is to choose the best book. They can't be looking over their shoulder at what writers have won before. If they do that, a prize will start to decline because people won't trust it."
Ion Trewin, director of the Booker Prize Foundation, agrees. "Judges have to be true to themselves and stand up for what they believe rather than what other people want them to believe," he says. He adds that if he felt a Booker prize jury was introducing extra-literary criteria – which winner will create the biggest buzz, for instance – he would remind the judges that their job was simply to choose the year's best novel.
AS Byatt, who won the Booker in 1990 for Possession and has sat on many prize juries, says judges often feel a pressure "to be kind or to do the unexpected". But she doesn't put it down to tall-poppy syndrome. "That makes it sound malevolent," she says. "It's more that some juries think a writer is already very well off and has had lots of publicity, there are other good books, so give it to someone else."
Such kindness should, she says firmly, be resisted. "I believe in literature, so one should decide which is the best book. It is a very bad idea to set out to please or surprise journalists." She dislikes the fact that a prize for women's fiction exists and argues that it is discriminatory and thus illegal, but she admires Richardson and her fellow judges for being so purist. "Mantel is a brilliant, dark writer," she says, "and if Bring Up the Bodies wins its third prize, I'll raise a glass to her."
