The award-winning historian and writer Antonia Fraser has resigned as an adviser to the Man Booker International Prize, after the related Man Booker Prize for Fiction recently and controversially loosened its eligibility requirements.
Starting next year, the annual fiction prize, one of the literary world’s most prestigious awards, will be open to any work originally written in English and published in Britain. Previously, only English-language novels by authors from Britain, other Commonwealth countries, Ireland and Zimbabwe had been eligible for the prize.
“I have resigned from the committee since I was not warned about this when I was asked to join in August,†Ms. Fraser told the London Evening Standard.
The eligibility changes have caused some consternation among bookish types, but Ms. Fraser’s participation is the first official casualty of the debate.
The international prize, for which Ms. Fraser was to serve as an adviser, is awarded every two years and honors an author for a body of work rather than a particular book. The most recent winner was Lydia Davis, an American.
A representative at Curtis Brown, the London-based agency, said Ms. Fraser was not commenting further about her decision at this time.
