Not the Booker prize: the winner and the future

It has been a long and windy road but we can now announce the winner of the inaugural Not the Booker prize - and the start of a debate about next year's competition

Left -Not the Booker prize: the Guardian mug has found a worthy home

OK - first things first. After weeks of longlists, shortlists, readings, discussions, voting, heated debate, posts from authors, praise, blame and all the other marvellous workings of democracy, we have a winner.

First, in our Not the Booker poll, is Rana Dasgupta, with 65 votes, well ahead of runners-up Jenn Ashworth (29 votes) and Simon Crump (28).
The level of engagement in this experiment has amazed and impressed us all and I think there are huge positives to be taken away from this.

A huge hooray, first and foremost, to everyone who read books they might otherwise have missed (Jenn Ashworth, Rana Dasgupta and Peter Murphy, in my case). There have been some wonderful books nominated, and Dasgupta is undeniably a worthy winner.

Thanks are owed, too - firstly and most importantly to Sam Jordison, who has read, digested and written thoughtfully about each of the books that reached the shortlist, and discussed them at length afterwards. Secondly, to everyone else who read and commented. And thirdly to all of you who cared enough to get stuck into the debate about the process. It hasn't been the smoothest ride(!), but I'm glad we embarked on it.

As anyone who's been following the Not the Booker will know, though, this doesn't tell the whole story. From the off, as much, if not more, space in the comment threads has been given over to a dissection of the process itself as to the books: whether the vote has been rigged; whether pr 'machines' have been cranked up to skew the result; whether authors have a right to ask their friends to vote; whether authors have a duty to ask their friends to vote; whether we should have just left the whole thing to the experts in the first place. Metaphoric tables have been thwacked, symbolic chairs overturned, allegorical water thrown in faces.

There's a reason, perhaps, why juries generally operate behind closed doors.

The rest of the story here.