2005 Judges
John Sutherland (Chair)
John Sutherland is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. He has taught over the years in universities across the English speaking world.He has published twenty books, edited 30 more and written many articles on a variety of subjects - but mostly concentrating on Victorian fiction, the history of publishing, and twentieth-century fiction. His last six books are Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography (Viking, 2004), Reading the Decades (BBC Books, 2002), Last Drink to LA (Short Books, 2001), The Literary Detective (Oxford, 2000), Henry V: War Criminal (with Cedric Watts and Stephen Orgel, Oxford, 1999) and Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? (Oxford, 1998). He also writes a weekly column for The Guardian.
Lindsay Duguid
Lindsay Duguid was born in Liverpool and educated at Upton Convent and Southampton University. She has worked for Penguin Books, the British Academy and the Financial Times.
She has been an editor at the Times Literary Supplement since 1978 and fiction editor there since 1990. She has reviewed novels for The Times, The Sunday Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday, the Washington Post and the New York Times, and been a judge for the Encore Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. She has never written a novel.
Rick Gekoski
Dr. Rick Gekoski is a writer, rare book dealer, and academic. An American who came to England in 1966, he took a D.Phil. in English at Oxford. From 1971-1987 he was a member of the English Department of the University of Warwick, where he became a Senior Lecturer and Chairman of the Faculty of Arts. In the mid-1980s he started his business dealing in rare books and manuscripts of twentieth century English and American literature, which he runs from his office in London.He has established two private presses, The Sixth Chamber Press and The Bridgewater Press, which issue finely printed editions of leading writers, novelists and poets.
As a writer he has published a critical book on Joseph Conrad, the Bibliography of William Golding, Staying Up (a book on Premiership Football), and most recently a collection of essays entitled Tolkien’s Gown and Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books, which was based on his Radio 4 Series, Rare Books, Rare People.
Josephine Hart
Josephine Hart was born and educated in Ireland. She was a Director of Haymarket Publishing before going on to produce a number of West End plays, including the award-winning, ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’ by Lorca, Noel Coward’s ‘The Vortex’ and ‘The Black Prince’ by Iris Murdoch. She presented the series ‘Books by my Bedside’.
She has published five novels: ‘Damage’ (Chatto & Windus,1991), filmed by Louis Malle in 1992, ‘Sin’ (Chatto & Windus, 1992), ‘Oblivion’ (Chatto & Windus, 1995), The Stillest Day (Chatto & Windus, 1998) And ‘The Reconstructionist’ (Chatto & Windus, 2001).Her Work has been translated into 26 languages.
Josephine Hart’s Poetry Hour, held at the British Library, has involved people such as Ralph Fiennes, Harold Pinter and Sir Roger Moore reading works by T.S Eliot, Auden, Larkin, Plath, Kipling, Byron and Browning.
David Sexton
David Sexton was born in 1958 and educated at Colchester Royal Grammar School for Boys and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read English and then attempted a thesis about Vladimir Nabokov and the writing of English as a second language.
He has been Literary Editor of the London Evening Standard since 1997 and Radio Critic of the Sunday Telegraph since 1991. He has also contributed to many other papers and magazines including the TLS, Spectator and Private Eye.
A keen reader of crime fiction, he has published a short study of the creator of Hannibal Lecter, The Strange World of Thomas Harris (Short Books, 2001). He lives in London.
