Booker Goes Bookish

Oct 18, 2011 - The Book Beast

Julian Barnes was the odds-on favorite to win the 2011 Booker Prize, but in a year filled with controversy, public sniping over readability, and a competing prize, it was still a surprise. Lucy Scholes reports from the winner’s party.

Tonight, from the annual ceremony at London’s Guildhall, Julian Barnes was announced as the 2011 Man Booker Prize winner for his novel The Sense of an Ending. Although he was resolutely not talking to the press, I managed to speak to him briefly in the early hours of the morning at a party given by his publisher (Jonathan Cape), as he held a well-deserved cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. Despite his much-quoted earlier description of the prize as “posh bingo,” the beaming smile on his face betrayed the fact that he was obviously overjoyed by his win. And when I asked him what he’d made of all the media attention surrounding this year’s judging process, he told me that while he sat listening to the chairman of the judging panel, Dame Stella Rimington, defending their inflammatory comments premising “readability” above all else, he “felt sure it was going against me.” I congratulated him on a “well-deserved win” and he commended me my alliteration, smiling profusely all the while.

It goes without saying that each year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist is greeted by a few groans of “I can’t believe they left so-and-so off it” and “What’s so-and-so doing on it instead?” And it’s a prize that continually keeps us guessing right up until the announcement itself, as supposed “hot favorites” are regularly passed over for underdogs. But this year the furor around the shortlist reached a fever pitch that’s never quite been seen before.

When the shortlist was announced on Sept. 6—Barnes's The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape), Carol Birch's Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books), Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers (Granta), Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail), Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English (Bloomsbury), and A. D. Miller's Snowdrops (Atlantic)—it was greeted with outrage that Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (and, to a lesser extent, Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side) hadn’t been included. Odds were immediately placed on Barnes as the favorite: after all, this was the fourth time he’d made the shortlist, and surely he was due a win?

Defending their somewhat surprising choices (putting aside the glaring omissions for a moment, both Pigeon English and Snowdrops are debut novels, and Snowdrops, a thriller set in Moscow, teeters dangerously on the edge of genre fiction), the judges—writer and journalist Matthew d’Ancona, author Susan Hill, author and politician Chris Mullin, and head of books at the Daily Telegraph Gaby Wood, chaired by Rimington, author and former director-general of MI5—were quoted on various occasions as stressing “readability” as a key criterion informing their selection process. A statement that, despite an increased emphasis on the importance of sales figures in what people are still arguing is a dying industry, incensed some of the literary movers and shakers in the publishing world.
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