Sunday Times critic honoured for 'expert caning' of rock star's autobiography
'Vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness' … AA Gill's verdict on Morrissey (right). Photograph: Richard Saker/Getty
"A cacophony of jangling, misheard and misused words … a sea of Stygian self-justification and stilted self-conscious prose … " AA Gill's caustic review of Morrissey's Autobiography has been named the Hatchet Job of the Year.
Gill was revealed as winner of the prize, set up by The Omnivore website and going to the writer "of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review" of the past year, on Tuesday evening. The Sunday Times journalist was up against biting write-ups from the likes of David Sexton, Rachel Cooke and Peter Kemp, but was found to be easily the most scathing of reviewers by judges Rosie Boycott, Brian Sewell and John Sutherland.
"The 30 reviewers on the long list were easily reduced to eight, and then, as we knocked them off the list from bottom to the top, the winner emerged without argument. It was exactly like awarding the head boy a gold cup for expert caning," said Sewell.
Morrissey's Autobiography was published by Penguin, under its Classics imprint – a decision with which Gill takes great issue in his review, calling it the singer's "most Pooterishly embarrassing piece of intellectual social climbing". Gill concludes that putting the book, "a potential firelighter of vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness", 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".
His review, which can be read in full on the Omnivore's website, also lays into Morrissey's take on his early life – "laughably overwrought and overwritten, a litany of retrospective hurt and score-settling that reads like a cross between Madonna and Catherine Cookson" – before dismissing the memoir as a book which should never have been written.
"This is a book that cries out like one of his maudlin ditties to be edited. But were an editor to start, there would be no stopping. It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability," writes Gill.
The Hatchet Job of the Year prize is intended to "raise the profile of professional critics and to promote integrity and wit in literary journalism". Tuesday's ceremony at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho, London, will see Gill presented with the "Golden Hatchet", and with a year's supply of potted shrimp.
He is the second Sunday Times journalist to win the award: Camilla Long took the prize last year, for her write-up of Rachel Cusk's memoir Aftermath, in which she dismissed Cusk as "a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish", and who "describes her grief in expert, whinnying detail". Adam Mars-Jones won the inaugural Hatchet for his review of Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall, in the Observer. "The book's pages are filled with thoughts about art, or (more ominously) Thoughts about Art," wrote Mars-Jones.
'Vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness' … AA Gill's verdict on Morrissey (right). Photograph: Richard Saker/Getty
"A cacophony of jangling, misheard and misused words … a sea of Stygian self-justification and stilted self-conscious prose … " AA Gill's caustic review of Morrissey's Autobiography has been named the Hatchet Job of the Year.
Gill was revealed as winner of the prize, set up by The Omnivore website and going to the writer "of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review" of the past year, on Tuesday evening. The Sunday Times journalist was up against biting write-ups from the likes of David Sexton, Rachel Cooke and Peter Kemp, but was found to be easily the most scathing of reviewers by judges Rosie Boycott, Brian Sewell and John Sutherland.
"The 30 reviewers on the long list were easily reduced to eight, and then, as we knocked them off the list from bottom to the top, the winner emerged without argument. It was exactly like awarding the head boy a gold cup for expert caning," said Sewell.
Morrissey's Autobiography was published by Penguin, under its Classics imprint – a decision with which Gill takes great issue in his review, calling it the singer's "most Pooterishly embarrassing piece of intellectual social climbing". Gill concludes that putting the book, "a potential firelighter of vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness", 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".
His review, which can be read in full on the Omnivore's website, also lays into Morrissey's take on his early life – "laughably overwrought and overwritten, a litany of retrospective hurt and score-settling that reads like a cross between Madonna and Catherine Cookson" – before dismissing the memoir as a book which should never have been written.
"This is a book that cries out like one of his maudlin ditties to be edited. But were an editor to start, there would be no stopping. It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability," writes Gill.
The Hatchet Job of the Year prize is intended to "raise the profile of professional critics and to promote integrity and wit in literary journalism". Tuesday's ceremony at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho, London, will see Gill presented with the "Golden Hatchet", and with a year's supply of potted shrimp.
He is the second Sunday Times journalist to win the award: Camilla Long took the prize last year, for her write-up of Rachel Cusk's memoir Aftermath, in which she dismissed Cusk as "a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish", and who "describes her grief in expert, whinnying detail". Adam Mars-Jones won the inaugural Hatchet for his review of Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall, in the Observer. "The book's pages are filled with thoughts about art, or (more ominously) Thoughts about Art," wrote Mars-Jones.
Gill was revealed as winner of the prize, set up by The Omnivore website and going to the writer "of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review" of the past year, on Tuesday evening. The Sunday Times journalist was up against biting write-ups from the likes of David Sexton, Rachel Cooke and Peter Kemp, but was found to be easily the most scathing of reviewers by judges Rosie Boycott, Brian Sewell and John Sutherland.
"The 30 reviewers on the long list were easily reduced to eight, and then, as we knocked them off the list from bottom to the top, the winner emerged without argument. It was exactly like awarding the head boy a gold cup for expert caning," said Sewell.
Morrissey's Autobiography was published by Penguin, under its Classics imprint – a decision with which Gill takes great issue in his review, calling it the singer's "most Pooterishly embarrassing piece of intellectual social climbing". Gill concludes that putting the book, "a potential firelighter of vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness", 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".
His review, which can be read in full on the Omnivore's website, also lays into Morrissey's take on his early life – "laughably overwrought and overwritten, a litany of retrospective hurt and score-settling that reads like a cross between Madonna and Catherine Cookson" – before dismissing the memoir as a book which should never have been written.
"This is a book that cries out like one of his maudlin ditties to be edited. But were an editor to start, there would be no stopping. It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability," writes Gill.
The Hatchet Job of the Year prize is intended to "raise the profile of professional critics and to promote integrity and wit in literary journalism". Tuesday's ceremony at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho, London, will see Gill presented with the "Golden Hatchet", and with a year's supply of potted shrimp.
He is the second Sunday Times journalist to win the award: Camilla Long took the prize last year, for her write-up of Rachel Cusk's memoir Aftermath, in which she dismissed Cusk as "a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish", and who "describes her grief in expert, whinnying detail". Adam Mars-Jones won the inaugural Hatchet for his review of Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall, in the Observer. "The book's pages are filled with thoughts about art, or (more ominously) Thoughts about Art," wrote Mars-Jones.
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