A Novel Approach

The winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize will be announced on 6 October. Ion Trewin leafs through the annals and reveals a few secrets about the literary award

Winning the Man Booker Prize changes your life. The Irish writer Anne Enright, who won for her novel The Gathering in 2007, spent the best part of the following year touring the world. Publishers in some 35 countries had bought the book and insisted that she come and promote. If she had sold 20,000 copies of her previous novels, now, with The Gathering, her sales were measured in hundreds of thousands, certainly 0.75m copies in English-language editions.

Nor is it a case of winner takes all (and “all” also includes a cheque of £50,000). Last year’s winner, Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger, had similar commercial success to Anne Enright’s, but one of the shortlisted titles, The Secret Scripture by another Irish writer Sebastian Barry, became a bestseller too. And the judges’ first sifting to produce this year’s longlist of 13 contenders – known as “The Man Booker Dozen” – has outsold any previous longlist.

When the Booker Prize – as it was then called – was set up in 1969 it was with the avowedly commercial intent of encouraging the sales of literary fiction. British publishers looked enviously across the Channel at the French Prix Goncourt, which rewarded each winner with several hundred thousand extra copies sold. The Booker company had among its business interests the ownership of literary copyrights including Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer. Financing a literary prize was a way of putting something back.

The early years had a modest effect, even though winners included V S Naipaul, J G Farrell, Nadine Gordimer and Iris Murdoch. But the prize took off in 1980 when the shortlist included two literary heavyweights, William Golding (for Rites of Passage) and Anthony Burgess (for Earthly Powers). The press drew on the boxing analogy and speculation reached the front pages. By then the judges were ensuring advance secrecy by selecting the winner late in the afternoon of the prize dinner. Burgess told Martyn Goff, the Booker administrator, that he would only attend the dinner if he was told beforehand that he had won. Goff refused to be bullied and Burgess stayed away, sulking, it was said, in his Savoy suite. Golding proved to be the winner.

Controversy and the Booker have been regular bedfellows. John Berger, the 1972 winner for G, announced that he would give half his £5,000 winnings to the rebel African-American Black Panther movement because he viewed Booker, with its Caribbean business interests, as imperialist. A decade later when the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally won for Schindler’s Ark, there were many who shouted “foul” on the basis that Keneally’s telling of the story of a good German who saved hundreds of Jews from the Holocaust was actually non-fiction. But the more the press reported the fulminations of literary critics, the more copies Schindler’s Ark sold. Helped in the 1990s by Steven Spielberg’s enthralling film adaptation, Schindler’s List (1993), the novel has gone on to sell considerably in excess of 2m copies in its British editions alone, making it the bestselling Booker winner ever.

From the beginning it was decided that judges would be expected to read every book submitted. Some other prizes employ literary hacks to sift through the entries and provide the named judges with a shortlist on which to adjudicate. But the Booker Prize Foundation, which administers the prize, has steadfastly refused to take that route. As literary director, I appoint the judges. One year I rang up a well-known and highly regarded poet and asked him if he would be a judge. Silence greeted my question and then he responded: “How many books would I have to read?” “Probably 110-120.” “And how much time would I have?” “Four months.” I could almost hear his mental calculation. Four months means roughly 120 days. That’s a book a day. “Absolutely no way,” he responded. No pleasantries. I heard the phone click back into its cradle.

I have to say I was pleased by his rejection. It sounded to me as if this potential judge would be starting from scratch, whereas the best judges read new fiction for pleasure. It is rare that they haven’t already read some of the entries even before the publishers’ submission lists start rolling in during the spring.

The 2009 judges, chaired by the broadcaster and author James Naughtie, soon realised that this would be a vintage year. Eight former winners had new novels, as did a dozen writers previously shortlisted. But fiction is also about renewal. The English language continues to generate creativity that is the envy of other nations. This year’s entry list included a score of first novels or fiction by those who had yet to make their mark. As past winners Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), Keri Hulme (The Bone People), DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little) – to name but three – have shown, being a first-timer is no bar to winning.

Ion Trewin is literary director of the Man Booker Prize.

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