From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about 2015 Folio Prize winner Akhil Sharma’s Family Life, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

Michael Cunningham on Anne Carson

RED DOC JACKETSeeing Anne Carson’s name on the list feels like vindication for those of us who’ve long insisted that that the line between poetry and prose implies a certain under-estimation of what poets and fiction writers actually do. Any significant work of fiction treats language in a musical (“poetic”) manner; every significant work of fiction is as much concerned with the sound of its sentences as it is with the clankings of its plot (however adroitly silenced). Seeing Red Doc> on a fiction list represents the breaking-down of rather useless categories; a step toward a future in which poets and fiction writers are not sent, with quite such unquestioning dispatch, into one room or another.