Man Booker Winner Wasn't Entered By Publisher

Man Booker judge Frances Wilson reveals what went on behind the scenes, and how the winner wasn’t even entered by his publisher.
by Frances Wilson
The Telegraph, 13 Oct 2010

Howard Jacobson with his book 'The Finkler Question' Photo: AP

Forget reading for pleasure: reading is a high-risk activity, at least it is if you are doing it properly. This is what I learnt from the 139 books submitted for the Man Booker prize this year: good books take you to strange places. I opened each novel as I would enter a party, with the expectation of emerging either sated or frustrated but certainly changed.
The title of Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room reflected the whole experience of judging the Man Booker: since Christmas, when the novels began to pile up like pillars in my tiny study, I found myself inhabiting, along with Sir Andrew Motion, Tom Sutcliffe Deborah Bull and Rosie Blau, a number of strange rooms, including, of course, the 11 sq ft space described by Emma Donoghue in Room.


For the past eight months the judges have met up with one another on a regular basis. Our meetings, which were always witty and rewarding, were also a reminder of the risk involved in reading. We did not always come back from the same book having had the same experience; some journeys were better than others. Strong books, like strong people, are divisive – a sentence that moved one of us to tears would leave another dry-eyed, a character one of us thought empty, another would find full – and we each fell for novels that did not make the long list. I loved the eerie poise of Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart; Tom Sutcliffe loved Joseph Connolly’s Ghostlight, Rosie Blau championed Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil, Deborah Bull adored Tom Connolly’s The Spider Truces.

We fought for the books in which we found originality, invention, wisdom and beauty, but it was striking how the books also fought for themselves. This was the effect of reading back to back, rather than savouring a single novel over a long, hot summer.

How did each book measure up to the next one? Was the book we were discussing, in the words of Harold Bloom, the Simon Cowell of literary criticism, better than, worse than, or equal to the one before? Once reading becomes a competition between novels, each one takes on an energy of its own and we watched as they not only destroyed one another but occasionally destroyed themselves.

The full interesting story at The Daily Telegraph. All book judges should read this.

And from The Bookseller overnight:
Cape offered less for the winning book than Bloomsbury when it came up for auction because of the unearned advances on his previous titles, Cape's Dan Franklin told us this week: "I am delighted for him, but as you can imagine its bitter sweet. I've said for the last 15 years that he is one of the best UK writers."

It is easy to see the problem. Jacobson’s total volume sales across his 16 titles since Nielsen Bookscan records began in 1998 just top 90,000 copies, with The Finkler Question one of the poorest selling of the shortlisted titles, having sold 8,300 copies to date. However, the 2008 winner, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (Atlantic), had sold fewer than 6,000 copies at the time it picked up the prestigious award, but it has since gone on to sell 527,000 copies, taking £3.6m through the tills.

Since 1998, the average winner of the prize has notched sales of 400,000, though Kiran Desai's 2006 winner The Inheritence of Loss sold just shy of 180,000.