Booker Prize? Who wants a literary award anyway?
By James Delingpole writing in the Telegraph
10/09/2008

Token Asian; Oirish misery novelist; another token Asian; Guardian woman; gay; token Australian wild-card with beard who looks definitely a bit foreign. Hmm. I wonder which of the usual suspects on the shortlist is going to win the Booker Prize this year.

Authors from India, Britain, Australia and Ireland were among the six shortlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize

"Aaagh!" I'm going to go, when I see these appallingly sexist, racist, homophobic words under my byline in bald print in a respectable, widely read national newspaper. "Did I really write that sentence? Was I drunk? Was I trying to kill my literary career stone dead?"

Well, no, I hope not. All I'm trying to do is tell you what an awful lot of novelists out there are secretly going to be thinking when they open their newspapers and see that Aravind Adiga, Sebastian Barry, Amitav Ghosh, Linda Grant, Philip Hensher and Steve Toltz have made it to the finals of Britain's most prestigious literary prize.

Not that any of them would ever publicly admit as much, of course. One of the first rules you learn as a novelist is: "Never, ever slag off other novelists in print unless you're deliberately trying to start a mutually beneficial, profile-raising feud."

Read his full view at the Telegraph online.