Man Booker Prize winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North at centre of bitter literary spat

AC Grayling versus Michael Hofmann: Booker Prize chairman goes to war with critic over scathing review

Booker Prize chairman AC Grayling felt Michael Hofmann's review of 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' by Richard Flanagan was too harsh

 Nick Clark 

arts correspondent - The Independent

Thursday 29 January 2015

It was lauded by almost every reviewer, and won the coveted Booker Prize for fiction.

But Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is now at the centre of a bitter literary spat, after a venomous review in the London Review of Books sparked an equally poisonous response from the chairman of the Booker Prize panel.

The reviewer in question, poet and critic Michael Hofmann, set about dismantling Flanagan’s novel over 2,500 words. He dismissed the work as “half-hearted” and “all bite and no chew”, and, quoting Oscar Wilde, said it would require a “heart of stone to read without laughing”.

More