Hitting the Headlines
Controversy throughout the prize’s history
The Man Booker Prize has always attracted – and to some extent courted – controversy. Here are just some of the stories that have made the headlines over the years.
1969
The first Booker Prize was awarded to P H Newby for Something to Answer For. In the early days the judges came to their decision a full month before the announcement was made. This first awards ceremony was held at Stationer’s Hall and PH Newby was presented with a winner’s cheque for £5,000. As Tom Maschler recalls, the prize had an impact from the start and Something to Answer For immediately appeared on the Evening Standard bestseller list, the first time that a British novel had made its way onto such a list purely as the result of winning a prize.
1970
The running of the Booker Prize transferred from the Publishers Association to the National Book League (later Book Trust) with its Director, Martyn Goff, as Administrator.
1971
This was the year when the Booker Prize had its first controversy, in the form of one of the judges, Malcolm Muggeridge. Having read his way through most of the submissions he found himself ‘out of sympathy’ with them and withdrew his services, ‘nauseated and appalled’. Needless to say that year’s winner, V S Naipaul’s In a Free State, chalked up record sales.
1972
John Berger was the 1972 winner with G and another controversy hit the prize. Guests at the dinner in the Café Royal were astonished when Berger got up and announced he was planning to give half his prize money to the Black Panther movement in protest at what he alleged was Booker’s colonialist policy in the West Indies. In fact Booker had had its sugar plantations and refineries confiscated 10 years previously - and the Black Panther movement had dissolved two years before. Rebecca West, a guest, was so shocked that she stood up and protested noisily; another guest, Terence Kilmartin, the literary editor of the Observer, walked out in disgust at Berger’s behaviour.
1973
J G Farrell also used his winner’s speech at the awards ceremony to denounce capitalism, as represented by Booker. Unlike Berger he retained his £5,000 in its entirety
1974
The shortlist this year included Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up, which caused a few raised eyebrows as Elizabeth Jane Howard, his wife, was one of the three judges. Despite her assertion that this was ‘easily Kingsley’s best book’, Amis was beaten by the first Booker Prize tie, Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton’s Holiday.
1975
Authors were insulted that the judges found only two books worthy of shortlisting out of a total 83 submissions.
1976
Betting on the shortlist and winner began but for only one year. A leak the following year led the bookies to withdraw and betting was not reintroduced until 1979
Harold Wilson, having recently resigned as prime minister, came to the dinner because his wife Mary was one of the judges, but was only in time for pudding since he had spent the first part of the evening at an international boxing match.
Melvyn Bragg presented the first ever TV broadcast of the Booker Prize, live on BBC2.
1977
Chairman Philip Larkin threatened to jump out of the window if Paul Scott’s Staying On didn’t win. Luckily it did.
1978
The prize money doubled to £10,000, claimed by Iris Murdoch for The Sea, the Sea.
1980
This year was a turning point for the prize with the battle of the giants, William Golding and Anthony Burgess. Burgess made it plain from the moment his book was shortlisted that he was not willing to attend the awards ceremony at Guildhall unless he had Martyn Goff’s assurance that he had won. He hadn’t, so he stayed put at the Savoy while Golding collected the prize for Rites of Passage. Golding’s book went on to sell 60,000 copies; Burgess’s Earthly Powers 40,000.
1982
The controversy this year revolved around whether or not the winning book, Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, was fiction or non-fiction. Despite, or perhaps because of that, it went on to become one of the best selling Booker Prize winners ever, selling over a million copies.
1983
Chair Fay Weldon, put in the difficult position of having to choose between J M Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K and Salman Rushdie’s Shame, told Martyn Goff that she never made decisions at home. ‘My husband makes them all.’
1984
Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac was the surprise winner. No one was more astonished than the author herself who had backed J G Ballard to win.
1985
Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, a first novel, was the surprise winner this year. The first print-run of the book was 800 copies and one review described it as ‘a disaster’. Nevertheless, having won the prize, the book went on to sell 34,000 copies in hardback.
Joanna Lumley, one of the judges, said of her experience; ‘The so-called bitchy world of acting was a Brownie’s tea party compared with the piranha-infested waters of publishing.’
1986
Kingsley Amis won the prize this year with The Old Devils, somewhat surprisingly perhaps since four of the five judges were women. In his acceptance speech he repented about his previous criticism of the prize saying, ‘Now I feel it is a wonderful indication of literary merit’. He also said that he planned to buy new curtains with his prize money.
1988
Michael Foot was chair and was accused of backing Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses because Rushdie was a member of the Labour Party.
1989
Controversy arose when Martin Amis’s London Fields was excluded because of feminist objections from the two women judges.
1990
A S Byatt told the audience at Guildhall that she planned to spend her prize money on building a swimming pool at her house in Provence.
1991
There was a tremendous row between chairman Jeremy Treglown and one of his judges, Nicholas Mosley, because Mosley simply didn’t like any of the books on the shortlist. Such was the strength of his feeling that he eventually resigned and left the panel.
1992
The judges, under chair Victoria Glendinning, came under fire for splitting the prize between Michael Ondaatje and Barry Unsworth. As a result the Booker Prize management committee changed the rules so that in future only one book could win.
1993
Anthony Cheetham, publisher of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, called the judges ‘a bunch of wankers’ for not shortlisting the book.
This was also the year when, to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the prize, three former chairmen of the judges - Malcolm Bradbury, David Holloway and W L Webb – were asked to choose the book which they believed to be the best of the previous winners. Their ‘Booker of Bookers’ was Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which had won the prize in 1981. Rushdie described it as ‘the greatest compliment I have ever been paid as a writer.’
1994
The year of the ‘Mogadon’ shortlist when judge Julia Neuberger dissociated herself from the winner, James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late.
This was the year too when judge James Wood recommended a novel by Clare Messud to his fellow judges, conveniently forgetting to mention that she was his wife.
1996
No sooner had Graham Swift won the prize for Last Orders than a controversy sprang up over the similarity of strucure between that and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Swift acknowledged the similarity.
1998
Chair Douglas Hurd overran his speech which was going out live on television by eight minutes. As a result viewers came very close to not learning the name of that year’s winner – Ian McEwan for Amsterdam.
1999
J M Coetzee became the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice – first in 1983 with Life & Times of Michael K and now with Disgrace.
2000
Top chef Gordon Ramsay was invited to supervise the awards dinner for 550 people at London’s Guildhall. Ramsay had been appointed by Booker plc to act as a food consultant to the company and his involvement in the dinner linked the prize more firmly with Booker’s food business.
2001
For the first time in the prize’s 33-year history, the longlist of 24 books was made public. The BBC renewed its partnership with the Booker Prize after a four year flirtation with Channel 4 and the newly relaunched Booker Prize website attracted over 2 million hits during October alone.
Peter Carey became the second double-winner of the prize with True History of the Kelly Gang.
2002
The Man Group was announced as the new sponsor for the Booker Prize. The new arrangement was a five year one, during which time the award was to be known as the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
The prize money was increased to £50,000 for the winning author (previously £20,000) and £2.500 for each of the six shortlisted authors (previously £1,000). The awards ceremony moved from Guildhall to the British Museum.
There was widespread speculation that the prize was going to expand to include American writers – a claim that the organisers consistently denied. However, a small working party was set up to look into possible extensions for the prize.
Yann Martel proved a hugely popular winner with Life of Pi. The book went straight to number 1 in The Sunday Times bestseller list and sold almost 300,000 copies in hardback. It was a first for Canongate, his Scottish publisher, who then sold foreign rights to 40 overseas publishers as well as the film rights.
Life of Pi was another winner to provoke a plagiarism row with the accusation that Martel had stolen the idea from a Brazilian author, Dr Moacyr Scliar. In his defence Martel said, ‘I saw a premise I liked and told my own story with it.’
Lisa Jardine, chair of the judges, was adamant that there was no similarity between the books and defended Life of Pi as one of the best winners in the history of the prize.
2003
DBC Pierre won the Man Booker Prize with his novel Vernon God Little. His win coincided with a public confession that he had spent a ten year period betraying and fleecing friends over three continents. On winning the prize, DBC Pierre said that the cheque would go straight to the people he owed.
2004
Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, a devastating satire of Tory government in the 1980s, is hailed by the media as ‘the first gay novel’ to win the prize.
The Man Booker International Prize, a new bi-annual prize awarded to an author for a body of work, is launched in June 2004.
2006
Kiran Desai wins the Man Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss. Her mother Anita Desai, herself shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, is delighted with the news.
2007
The Man Booker Prize introduced for the first time the Man Booker Dozen – a longlist of twelve or thirteen titles.
Ian McEwan’s short novel ‘On Chesil Beach’ causes controversy when the media claim that is a ‘novella’ and therefore not eligible for the prize.
Anne Enright became the fourth Irish novelist to win the Man Booker Prize with her novel The Gathering.
