Fiachra Gibbons
In the time-honoured tradition of the Booker, all the leaks about who would be shortlisted this year were wrong. Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Roddy Doyle – the heavyweight “favourites” for this year’s prize -didn’t make the shortlist. Instead, South Africa’s JMCoetzee is up for the prize for the second time.
The chairman of the judges, the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, is known to have made a determined effort to have Seth’s An Equal Music included, while judge John Sutherland fought “tooth and nail” for Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
Kaufman said that the five-strong panel found 10 books of “major stature”, but would not elaborate on those that just missed out. “This shortlist is one of the strongest for years. Choosing one of the six to win will be really challenging,” he added.
Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif is the wildcard choice. Organiser Martyn Goff said Soueif’s romance, The Map of Love, “came from nowhere and surprised everyone”.
The run-up to the prize has been unusually quiet this time, considering that the judging panel is chaired by the forthright Kaufman and includes such divergent personalties as “lipstick feminist” Natasha Walter, Sutherland and the novelist Sheena Mackay.
The eventual winner will be announced at Guildhall, in London, on October 25.
Goff, who has run the contest for the past 31 years, has caused controversy by saying that the winner of the prize, the most prestigious literary award in the world, should get just 5.
Goff dropped the bombshell after sniping from Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the 1989 Booker for The Remains of the Day. He said the prize money was “pathetic” given the amount of free publicity the Booker company got from staging the award.
Goff said that he would not stop Booker giving more than 21 000 in prize money, but he felt that the money “did not matter any more”.
“The Prix Goncourt is only 50 francs, and if the Booker were to do the same I do not think it would make any difference,” he said. “It certainly would not to Arundhati Roy, who sold 300 000 copies [in Britain alone] of The God of Small Things, or Roddy Doyle who probably made a million from his win.”
Yet at least two writers, James Kelman and Keri Hulme, are known to have made very little money from their victories.
The Booker has been left trailing in the wake of big-money rivals such as the 100 000 Irish Times Impac Prize. But the Booker’s kudos is still reckoned, at worst, to shift 10 000 hardback copies of a winning novel.
Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha sold 27 000 copies in Britain within half an hour of bookshops opening on the day after he won the prize. It went on to sell 750 000 hardcovers in the UK alone.