A book prize as a force of change? Week in Books column

The British Library's usually atmosphere-free conference room was set to be filled to the rafters on Friday 20 March at a sell-out lecture on 'fiction as a social force' by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The lecture, however, was cancelled.

An inaugural talk launching the Folio Prize’s fiction festival, it would have been an addition, and precursor, to the winner's ceremony on Monday 23 March. The theme for the lecture was Ngozi Adichie’s idea but in some ways, it is as fittingly idealistic as the prize’s raison d’être itself – the idea that fiction matters, and affects changes. Its creation was a display of “people power” in 2011 when Andrew Kidd, then a literary agent at Aitken Alexander (soon to launch a new “books-related digital venture this Spring”, he tells me) got together with a group of writers, and took action against the Man Booker’s “dumbed-down” shortlist. What began as a protest became a new prize – fiction as a social force indeed! The organisation of this new prize was based on purist principles of judging literary fiction.

But what happens after the revolution, and how to sustain the momentum? For all the excitement such dust-kicking generates, the aftermath of such protest and noise can be difficult. We half expect it to carry on being noisy, occupying the same contrary space. Either that, or be hoist by its own petard and gradually give into the market, to become as populist as the prize it was set up to protest against.

Can the Folio prize continue being a force of change? The weekend festival strikes me as progress in that direction. Kidd tells me the point of it is to transform the literary prize so that is it not just about one winner on the one night, but a far more enriching event. There is also an attempt to bring a certain purity back to the literary festival by concentrating on discussion, not book-selling or celebrity, features which Joanna Trollope, Joanne Harris and James Runcie (former artistic director of Bath and London literature festivals) have recently complained about. So discussions between the festival’s 14 contributing authors are thematic, on betrayal, conflict, desire, in literature across the ages. Book titles don’t really feature. There are free readings on Sunday 22 March, by each of the eight shortlisted authors, which include Ali Smith, Colm Tóibín and Miriam Toews, opposite. You can amble into the British Library and hear them. I wonder if the Man Booker prize will one day add a weekend festival to its agenda. I do hope so.

To return to Ngozi Adichie’s lecture; as nostalgic as the central question sounds (remember when books such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Women’s Room proved stories really were integral to social shifts and battles?), it’s one that has been asked recurringly by several of this year’s shortlistees, according to Kidd. Rachel Cusk’s writer-narrator interrogates how people tell stories and why they tell them in Outline; a personal tragedy leads to the evolution of fictional characters in Akhil Sharma’s Family Life; Ali Smith’s How to be Both tells at least two stories at once, asking us which should be prioritised as the “central” one. Kidd thinks it might, to some degree, point to a certain soul-searching, the power of literature being weighed up against competing new media that can inspire revolution in Egypt in 140 characters, or spark anti-war outrage via the Baghdad blog. “Many of the fictions seem to ask why stories matter, and especially long-form storytelling. Maybe it’s because the story is competing with so much other media. People are more distracted than ever before.”

If you’ve got your own opinion on it, take action. Go along this weekend and express it.

Lost fictions (and soldiers) brought out of the shadows

Two novels anonymously published in their time and re-released this spring will make for fascinating reading. One is Gore Vidal’s “pulp crime novel”, Thieves Fall Out, hitherto “lost” for 60 years and never published under the author’s name (his pen name on its 1953 release was his uncle’s, Cameron Kay). In fact, it only recently became an open secret that the novel was his. The second sounds even more intriguing: Schlump – the Story of an Unknown Soldier, written anonymously by Hans Herbert Grimm, and among the books burned by the Nazis in 1933 (he joined the Nazi party to save detection and his identity wasn’t uncovered until 2008). Both cases prove that authors can remain as anonymous as they want, or need, to be.

Chimamandah Ngozi Adichie's lecture at The British Library was cancelled on Friday afternoon