Booker winner Byatt slams Harry Potter books

Booker Prize-winner AS Byatt has taken a swipe at the Harry Potter books, saying they are for readers whose imaginations stretch to “soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip”.

The writer, best known for her book Possession, said adults had become fans simply because the bestsellers allowed to regress to childhood.

And she suggested millionaire Potter author JK Rowling did not have the skills of a great writer as she aired her views in a column in the New York Times.

Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix shattered sales records when it was released last month, becoming the fastest selling book of all time.

But Byatt said of the book: “It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.”

She added: “Ms Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn’t known, and doesn’t care about, mystery.

“They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don’t have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.”

Byatt also claimed the books were “derivative”.

She said Rowling’s world was “made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature – from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from Star Wars to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper.”

Byatt instead praised “the great Terry Pratchett”.

She said he has a “multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motif”.

Byatt concludes by saying there is “nothing wrong” with Potter.

“But it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats’s ’magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’,” she added.