By history and by ethnic make-up Britain is a polyglot society. It has the opportunity to be wide-ranging and cosmopolitan in its reading choices, but is often said not to be. Indeed, in its literary (and other) tastes it is accused of insularity and philistinism. How true is this?
When in the late 1980s I ran the literature policies of the Arts Council of Great Britain-the predecessor to the four Arts Councils we now have-I undertook, with the help of the Library Association, to test whether British reading tastes, as evidenced by library loans of fiction and poetry, were as parochial as many people assumed. We found that loans of foreign literature were indeed falling, although there were exceptions where the local library authority made active attempts to reverse the trend-as they did in Sheffield and Birmingham.
There were two probable reasons for this decline. The first was the changed experience and training of people recruited to library careers, who no longer came into the system with English or arts-based degrees; instead they were information technology managers. If you were a sixth-former interested in doing a project on African novels or European poetry, the library staff were less likely than they once had been to know where to guide you. At the same time new supply and demand principles had been introduced. Put crudely, if there were ten people at a time wanting to borrow a Jeffrey Archer novel and only one reader a year who was interested in contemporary Finnish poetry, edited and translated by Herbert Lomas, then the library was instructed to buy multiple copies of the former and to forget the latter altogether.
But there were (and are) countervailing forces. Imaginative promotion schemes, funded by the Arts Council and the Regional Arts Boards, have helped to draw attention back to foreign authors, both those in translation and those who wrote in English. Also, school curricula changed dramatically in the supposedly jingoistic 1980s. Perhaps in a spirit of covert rebellion against the prevailing political tone of the decade, teachers became much more willing to contemplate the teaching of texts from non-Anglo-Saxon cultures.
In 1972 I had helped to form the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African and Associated Literatures, which served as a pressure group to draw to the attention of examination boards the quality of contemporary writing in English outside Britain and the US, and its relevance to a changing Britain. By the late 1980s there was hardly a school or univer-sity in the country which did not teach some of these literatures. Post-colonial writing is now one of the most popular courses offered in British higher education.
There is conflicting evidence about the response of the British book-buying public to novelists and poets from other countries. Certainly, more is available. We remain, however, among the least enthusiastic buyers in Europe of translated work. It accounts for less than 3 per cent of our book-buying, whereas in Denmark it is more than 40 per cent. Although writers such as Jostein Gaarder and Peter H?eg may occasionally leap to international prominence from the obscurity of unfashionable languages, or the Nobel prize may rescue from neglect writers long admired in their own countries but scarcely known elsewhere-such as Jos? Saramago or Wislawa Szymborska-British interest in translated fiction and poetry, as measured by sales in bookshops, has not shifted in the past 20 years.
Literary prizes are for many people the portal to reading undiscovered literatures, although as the word-of-mouth success of Louis de Bernières's Captain Corelli's Mandolin demonstrated, they are not the only means for this. This year's Booker prize shortlist was a microcosm of the prize over the 31 years of its history, with comparatively little attention to mainstream middle England (among the six authors only Michael Frayn was English). Writers from Scotland, Ireland, Egypt, India and South Africa (the winner) featured on it. Many of these writers were already bestsellers but the publicity of a Booker short-listing can attract attention to a writer's earlier work. On the day that Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif was short-listed for her novel The Map of Love, she was greeted as if she had just arrived from nowhere, but her first novel, Aisha (1983), is now in wide demand. The British are apparently rather schizoid in their literary taste, being unadventurous when left to themselves but willing to be led to water.
Many of our bestselling authors can sell better abroad than they do in Britain. Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, for example, regularly sell more of their books in French in France than they do in English in Britain. PD James once told me that the government in Prague had had to set an upper limit of 200,000 on the print run of Devices and Desires, an astonishingly high sales figure for any novelist in Britain, let alone in the Czech Republic.
British writers are in great demand abroad, as overseas book sales indicate: ?207m in book exports to the US in 1998, an increase of 16 per cent in two years; ?10m to Argentina; even ?110,000 to Bhutan, an increase of 2,045 per cent. Abroad is interested in us. The evidence of our enthusiasm for abroad is patchier, but given the rising use of overseas literatures in education, more availability of foreign titles in shops and some libraries, and the domination of literary prizes by non-Brits, the accusation that British readers are dully parochial is increas-ingly difficult to sustain.
