Kirsty Gunn: Multiple reasons to feel dismayed by our monoculture

I’ve just had an interesting letter from a writer friend. We have both been in discussion about this year’s Booker Prize for novels and he, as a distinguished and well known author who has been shortlisted for the Booker in the past, along with a whole welter of literary awards including a great a great number that he has also won, was telling me how disillusioned he was by the entire process of prizegiving and its effect on our understanding of literature. “When did it all get so dull?” he said. “I suppose when literature was signed up as a polite, vaguely liberal, conscience-salving instrument of western globalisation.”