|
|
 |
| |
Booker’s cool ‘cabinet secretary’
IT'S the 40th.
So as the excitement mounts for the announcement this week of the shortlist for this year’s £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, there will be at least one person keeping his cool.
He is Ion Trewin, 65, journalist, literary editor, publisher, who lives on Highgate Hill. Currently he is the prize’s literary director with the task of ensuring the judges follow the rules.
It’s his third year in the post, and undoubtedly his experience of the arcane world of books, as well as the Booker Prize itself, is a real asset, especially if controversy hits the headlines.
“Choosing the shortlist can be fraught at times but not necessarily so when you have someone as terrific as Michael Portillo in the chair,” Trewin said. “Being there and seeing what’s going on is a real privilege. I’m kind of the cabinet secretary who sees that all goes well.”
Much has changed since Hampstead publisher Tom Maschler first conceived a British version of the French Goncourt Prize, in a bid to raise the standard of British fiction and, in particular, boost sales with a major literary prize.
“It took a few years to take off,” says Trewin. “But when it did it certainly did the job and had the effect on occasions of changing the lives of some authors, who were virtually unknown and suddenly found their books selling by the thousand.”
There are in fact three first novelists on the long list for this year’s prize, for which there were 114 entries.
This month the Booker goes digital and extracts from the shortlisted novels
will be available by audio and/or text on mobile phones.
So you will be able to connect with Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs, which stands at 8/1 with the bookmakers, or works by first-time novelists Aravind Adiga or Steve Toltz, both at 13/2.
“But what is really important is that the prize maintains the quality of novels being entered – and it is excellent here in the UK compared with countries like France, and gives such opportunities to new writers,” insists Trewin.
“Renewal is so vital to literature.
“Whether they are well known authors or not doesn’t matter. We look for a winner that is worthy of the prize.”
GERALD ISAAMAN
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
