Saturday, October 11, 2008


The Booker's Big Bang
John Sutherland
Published, The New Statesman, 09 October 2008

The Booker Prize, which will be awarded on 14 October, is 40 years old, but it wasn't always the 600lb gorilla of literary prizes. John Sutherland recalls how a demure award came to embrace the values of the Thatcherite Eighties.


Booker is 40. It now ranks as Britain's second oldest national fiction prize. Pride of place in that league goes to the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, an annual award in the gift of the Regius Professor of English at Edinburgh University. That department plausibly claims to be the first of its kind anywhere, which gives the prize - the first of its kind in Britain - a double lustre. Who was James Tait Black? Don't ask. I've looked it up myself and always forget - a Scottish publisher, I believe, of whom confusingly many were surnamed Black. He was probably the first something.

The JTB was set up in 1919 and duly picked a dud - The Secret City, Hugh Walpole's novel about the ongoing Russian Revolution. Amends were made the following year with D H Law rence's The Lost Girl. The character of the JTB over the decades after its foundation was established by the long-serving Herbert J C Grierson, the greatest Sir Walter Scott scholar of his day. The JTB, like HJCG, was "solid".

Unlike its English rival, the JTB is not a household name - not even in bookish houses (by Waterstone's reckoning, that means one where 12 books a year are consumed). Every literate citizen whose reading has taken them beyond Key Stage Four of the National Curriculum will know about the Booker ("Man Booker" since 2002, when the financial slack was taken up by a friendly hedge fund). Like the Cup Final and the Grand National, the announcement in October is an annual event. Barring cataclysm, it rates top place on the morning bulletins. Jim Naughtie would not have it otherwise. It's big news.

Booker is also one of the mighty engines of the 21st-century book trade. Where the "quality" or "literary" novel is concerned, it is the mightiest such engine. Booker forges international name-recognition and makes the lucky author (and, yes, luck does come into it) rich. Even those only long and shortlisted bloom under the golden shower.

Why is the Booker such a literary kingmaker and its venerable Scottish rival not? The JTB makes equally sagacious selections. In 2005, the year John Banville's The Sea won the Booker, the JTB went for Ian McEwan's Saturday. You can see the 80-year record of the Scottish prize on its Edinburgh University website, www. englit.ed.ac.uk/jtbwins.htm. The JTB's record stands up well. Better than Booker in its more wayward years. Senior Scottish professors are anything but skittish.

Read the rest of this most interesting story in The New Statesman online.

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