|
|
 |
| |
So Linda didn’t win the Booker, but think of the sales (and the free designer dress) order this book
EBULLIENT Linda Grant (pictured), the only woman on this year’s Man Booker Fiction Prize shortlist amid the splendour of the Guildhall finale last week, provided an acute insight into the event when she revealed her thoughts at the Cheltenham Literature Festival 24 hours later.
She was there to talk about her latest novel, The Clothes On Their Backs, but the audience was equally clamouring to know about being one of the shortlisted novelists at the event, won by the debut Indian writer Aravind Adiga.
“Literary prizes are a necessary evil,” Linda, 57, who lives a quiet life tucked away on the Highgate slopes, told me. “It is very naïve to believe that a jury – or a series of judgments – can possibly select the best book of the year. That’s because there aren’t any objective measurements.
“And prizes are stressful, part of the reason being that writers don’t actually live a public life. You write at home on your own. I may have been a journalist but writing is not a public event. So having all the attention directed towards you is quite uncomfortable.”
She accepts totally the value of major prizes in that they expose the chosen shortlisted book to massive publicity and sales – hers have been the best of this year’s contestants so far.
“All that increases dramatically and increased sales can be fantastic, but it goes on over a period of two and a half months,” she concedes. “The great joke going round the Guildhall among the shortlisted novelists was that perhaps we ought to ask for the prize to be paid in gold bullion because of the financial situation,” she mused.
“I hadn’t realised that Man plc is a major hedge fund. So we thought we might need to get the cheque into the bank
quickly while there was still a solvent bank about.”
There is too a price to pay for triumph. “That is being attacked by the press for winning,” she insists. “I saw it in the papers today. I saw it last year when Anne Enright won and today with Aravind. Yet you know there is going to be this price to pay. Some humiliating people will say: ‘The worst Booker year ever – how dare this person win it!’ and suggest that someone else should have won. Then the winner goes to this press conference afterwards with all these people asking these questions.
“I don’t know if this is something new or not, but it is the media looking for a story, for a fight, a controversy and a fuss. And if they don’t get it the Booker is seen as boring. But there can never be a consensus about who should have won a literary prize.”
She finds the negative attitude “surprising and unnerving” for the authors, who have been delighted to have reached the shortlist and, at the end of the evening, only want to go off and party with their friends, equally delighted whether or not they had won.
“You have to become much more hardened towards what is happening,” Linda advises. “You have to be pragmatic and hard-headed. Literary prizes sell books. That’s the bottom line and what it is all about. You shouldn’t be deluded into think that you have written the best novel. I actually read Aravind’s White Tiger. It was the only shortlisted book I have read. And I am absolutely delighted he has won.”
She had one up on the other contenders anyway. As the only female writer, she spent weeks worrying about what to wear, the more so because of the title of her book, though it has nothing to do with fashion – rather it’s about immigrants arriving in England.
Linda was given a £750 Ossie Clark designer dress to wear for free. “The label has been revived and I was wearing this updated 1970s Ossie Clark dress, the only one of its kind because it was a prototype that was later changed before it went into the shops.
“That’s the best thing that happened to me – and it didn’t happen to anyone else on the shortlist.”
 |
| |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
