I was very surprised to come across this just now. I've heard of the man before, but never read his work. From what I'd heard about his work, he's a bit of a pretentious fart, who's very verbose and loves to use words that no one has ever heard of, so I always assumed he'd be a leftist, as those writing traits nearly always come from people on the left.

if there was an award for controversies involving literary prizes, John Banville would have to be on the shortlist.

The Irish author, who won the Booker Prize in 2005 for The Sea, has been heavily criticised on social media for saying “I despise this ‘woke’ movement” in an interview for the Hay Festival Winter Weekend.

Asked whether it would be possible for him to win the Booker or even to get published today because of “this current suspicion about white straight men”, and whether he was now disadvantaged, he replied: “I would not like to be starting out now, certainly. It’s very difficult.

“I despise this ‘woke’ movement. Why were they asleep for so long? The same injustices were going on. It’s become a religious cult. You see people kneeling in the street, holding up their fists – that’s not going to do anything for black people."

“Black people or transgender people should not be given a special place. They should be given the same treatment as the rest of us. God, I can hear the Twitter comments going already. Do I care? Absolutely not.”

This year’s Booker Prize was won by Douglas Stuart, a gay Scottish-American writer. Last year’s prize was shared by Margaret Atwood for The Testaments and Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other. Evaristo responded to the Daily Telegraph’s report of Banville’s comments by tweeting: “To be ‘woke’ means striving to make society more equal & less discriminatory, so how can you despise it? Yet the term ‘woke’ is now being vilified, just as ‘feminism’ was for years. ‘When entitlement is the norm, equality feels like defeat.’ Katie Cannon.”

The Irish author was one of 150 authors, academics and journalists to sign a letter in Harper’s Magazine in October criticising “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favour of ideological conformity”.

The letter, whose signatories included Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, JK Rowling, Martin Amis and Noam Chomsky, began by stating that “our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial” and that the free exchange of information and ideas is “daily becoming more constricted” while it is now “all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought”.

As someone who dabbles in a bit of writing, it's great to see that a level of push back exists, even if it is small. He's without doubt right about everything he's said too. Lots of good literature will likely never see the light of day purely because said literature was create by white men. Whatever chance the white man in general has, the white man who doesn't conform to modern convention has little to no hope of success.