THREE DISTINGUISHED literary critics meet to determine which novelist is the greatest of the modern era. They travel from Rome to Washington, and end up in a converted medieval priory in France, where one of their number has built up a magnificent library. They begin with a list of 120 writers and whittle it down to 18. This is reduced to 17 when the death of Saul Bellow is announced.

Because this is the first Man Booker International prize, the only condition is that any work they choose must have been translated into English and be available to the general public. For the critics — John Carey, from England, Azar Nafisi, from Iran, and Alberto Manguel, from Argentina — this is a serious barrier. Time and again they are forced to discard major writers whose novels are simply unobtainable in translation: the Austrian novelist Peter Handke, whose books inspired the films of Wim Wenders; Michel Tournier, the most influential French writer of the past 25 years; Christoph Ransmayr, who shared Europe’s most prestigious new literary award, the Aristeion Prize, with Salman Rushdie; António Lobo Antunes, the brilliant Portuguese writer; the roll-call went on and on.

Finally, after considering a formidable list, which includes Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Milan Kundera and John Updike, they opt for Ismail Kadaré, the Albanian novelist. The announcement catches bookstores in Britain by surprise. Not a copy of his work can be found in Edinburgh, where the prize is to be awarded. It takes a week to round up enough to be available in time for the ceremony. As Professor Carey put it, in the course of an excoriating presentation speech on Monday night: “To an outsider, the British publishing industry can seem like a conspiracy intent on depriving English-speaking readers of the majority of good books written in languages other than their own.”

He spoke of a novel by Antonio Tabucchi — Pereira Declares — as one which, in the view of all the judges, “came close to being a perfect novel — brief, tragic, inspiring. Do read it if you haven’t yet,” he begged. I called Waterstone’s next day. The book has been out of print in Britain since 1995. No other Tabucchi titles are currently available.

How did we become so culturally insular? Why, unlike every other country in Europe, do we turn our backs on books by foreign writers? The statistics are shaming: in France a quarter of all books published are translations; in Britain the figure is only 3 per cent — and this includes technical, medical and scientific publications. Do we seriously think that a figure like that is a fair reflection of what is being written in Europe today, or in China, say, a country in ferment; in South America, the continent of Borges and Neruda; in Israel or Iraq? And do we care?

We should do. On the award night, I sat with a hundred or so others, to hear the simple, eloquent, and moving speech of acceptance made by Kadaré in the National Museum of Scotland. He spoke of how freedom and literature belong together and how, as a youth, during the years of suppression under Enver Hoxha, he was sustained and inspired by literature. Looming over his village was a sinister castle, used by successive regimes to house political prisoners. But he dreamt of another one — Macbeth’s castle in Scotland, made real for him when he read Shakespeare’s play at the age of 11, and copied it into his notebook. “My fascination with that distant northern castle was enough to make my local fortress fade into insignificance . . .” he said. “That teenager was already a citizen of another realm, the realm of literature. He had entrusted to it his imagination and also his moral conscience. Its laws came to override all other law. Its leaders — Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Kafka — became his true masters.”

And so the life of a suppressed writer in Albania was enriched by the literature of other lands. Meanwhile, ours limps along on a bland diet of Danielle Steel and celebrity cookery books. We are in thrall to the bestseller. Our literary ambitions are limited to riding the Hogwarts Express or cracking the Da Vinci code. Part of the reason is bleakly commercial — the publishing industry today, dominated by multinationals, favours hot properties at the expense of everything else. The booksellers are complicit in the pile ’em high, sell ’em quick mentality. Only rarely does a foreign writer have the credentials to penetrate this well- cushioned sanctuary.

There is, however, another, more worrying explanation, and it has to do with what one publisher described to me as “the rigid incuriosity of the English reader”. Despite globalisation, we have become more rather than less parochial when it comes to literature. Because we assume that English is now universally spoken and understood, we have ceased to believe that anything written in any other language is either interesting or important. Writers have lost touch with the literary cross-references that were the lifeblood of a previous generation. And yet, as Alberto Manguel, next to whom I was sitting, put it: “The same laxity, 50 or 60 years ago, would have meant, for the English reader, no Kafka, no Camus, no Calvino, no Borges.”

We need the literature of other countries to expand our horizons and stimulate our ideas. Without it, we are not only diminished, we are starved. Kadaré told us that during the worst of times, his nourishment came from great writing. “We believed in literature,” he said. “In return for our belief and our fidelity, literature granted us her blessing and protection.” It seems we are more deprived than he was.

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