The former poet laureate Andrew Motion has hit out at this year’s judges of the Man Booker prize for creating what he calls a “false divide” between highbrow literature and accessible books.

The judges’ focus on “readability” has provoked strong criticism from Motion, a trustee of the prize and former chair of judges, who said it “opens up a completely false divide between what is high end and what is readable, as if they are somehow in opposition to one other, which is patently not true”.

After reading 138 novels to come up with their longlist, the judges are now settling down to choose who will win £50,000 on Tuesday night, having read the shortlisted titles at least three times.

Motion said the Booker should not become a theatre in which a split is opened up between quality and readability. “That is a pernicious and dangerous thing.”

Motion said if he had been judging this year’s prize, he would have included novels by Alan Hollinghurst, Graham Swift, Philip Hensher, Edward St Aubyn and Ali Smith on his shortlist, as well as Julian Barnes‘s The Sense of An Ending, which did make the lineup. Read more.

See: The Guardian.co.uk