Wednesday, January 15, 2014

AA Gill on Morrissey and David Sexton on Eleanor Catton among Hatchet Job contenders

Hatchet Job of the Year award draws and quarters shortlist

Eight of the most cutting book reviews written last year are in contention for the prize honouring literary criticism's most poisonous pens
Hatchet
Hack jobs … a hatchet. Photograph: Getty Images

AA Gill's comprehensive dismissal of Morrissey's autobiography as "utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability" has won the Sunday Times reviewer a place on the shortlist for the most scathing review of 2013.

Eight cutting write-ups are in the running for the Hatchet Job of the Year award, run by the Omnivore website, from Gill's take-down of Morrissey in the Sunday Times ("Putting it in Penguin Classics doesn't diminish Aristotle or Homer or Tolstoy; it just roundly mocks Morrissey, and this is a humiliation constructed by the self-regard of its victim"), to David Sexton's dismissal of Eleanor Catton's Booker prize-winning tome The Luminaries. The prize is intended "to promote integrity and wit in literary journalism", with the winner, to be announced on 11 February, taking home a year's supply of potted shrimp.

"'Let's concede that The Luminaries is a stunning feat of construction," wrote Sexton in his review. "The Booker judges knew, whatever else its merits, they were giving the prize to a tremendously technically accomplished piece of work. I suspect some exhausted reviewers praised it for the same reason. It doesn't necessarily make it any good, of course. A ship made of matchsticks in a bottle is a feat of construction but not necessarily a great work of art."
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