On that all-important first Tuesday in November, I learned that the Melbourne Cup was won by Australian-bred Knight’s Choice at the odds of 90/1. Ridden by Irish jockey Robbie Dolan, the horse won in a photo-finish. I don’t know how much Robbie will take home, but the Cup itself carries more than 8 million dollars in prize money. And this week another prize was decided, (and the actual result did not take weeks to come through, as anticipated) this crucial contest for the Presidency of the United States.
But the anglophone chattering classes are excited about another prize and are waiting to learn which novelist has won the Booker, the leading literary prize for fiction in the English-speaking world. The prize money amounts to more than 50,000 pounds and brings the promise of mightily increased book sales with it. The prize was established in 1969, and all books entered must be published in Britain. Originally, only books from Britain and the Commonwealth could contend, but since 2014 the Booker has been open to any books written in English: this means a great deal of competition from the Americans, among other groups.
The announcement will be made on November 12 (or November 13 for those in Australia), and is of particular interest to Australians this year, as Charlotte Wood’s novel Stone Yard Devotional is on the shortlist. (Shortlists are a mixed blessing for writers: the near-and-yet-so-far syndrome is almost bound to affect those who miss out on the no.1 position, despite a modest cash award made to the losers.) While not exactly a cheerful read, Wood’s novel is a provocative and often inspiring one. The narrator is a woman who appears to have lost hope, and thus moves to live in a monastic community near her hometown. There are various grim trials to be endured, and vital questions are raised to be pondered. These concern matters such as grief, hope, forgiveness and the nature of goodness and community solidarity.
Australians have often done well in the Booker competition. Over the years, various greats have been shortlisted: Patrick White, Shirley Hazzard, David Malouf, Tim Winton, and Kate Grenville, among others. Thomas Keneally was shortlisted three times before winning with Schindler’s Ark, which was later made into the award-winning film Schindler’s List. This win was not without controversy, as Keneally had originally started to write non-fiction and then changed his mind and his writing, starting a fuss and a debate about the matter of faction, and the work’s eligibility.
Peter Carey has won the award twice. So has Adelaide resident and Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee, but he did not become an Australian citizen until 2006, after his wins. Charlotte Wood’s listing is the first Australian one since Richard Flanagan won in 2014 with The Narrow Road to the Deep North, while another reason for interest and excitement is that the short list of authors this year consists of five women and one man, a gender imbalance that has never been a feature of the shortlist before. The man is Percival Everett, author of James, a re-telling of Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In Everett’s version the runaway slave whose name is Jim, becomes a thoughtful, well-read man called James. Everett himself has slave ancestry, has been writing fiction for 40 years and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
If the shortlisted writers endure weeks of suspense, the judges, who are a new set every year, have their own trials to get through. The whole competition means a marathon of reading, and then there is the vital matter of selecting a winner: in 2021 the judges read 158 books, and the shortlisted books are usually read at least three times. Blood may not be spilled, but there is obviously a vast amount of toil, while some sweat is almost guaranteed. Then there are the tears, as serious quarrels among the judges are not unknown. According to an article published in the journal The Week in 2021, writer and judge Victoria Glendinning told another judge in 1992 that he was ‘a condescending bastard.’ One judge described the whole process as heartbreaking, for the book you really want to win may well not: the judging of the Prize itself has been described as ‘a heady tangle of arguments, controversy and speculation.’
Political correctness eventually became an issue, for it was twenty years before any Black or Asian person was included in the judging panel. Since 2015, however, one third of the panel has consisted of people of colour. More politics: in 2014 publishers were very annoyed by the decision to open the competition more widely. Judges can also become discouraged. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was once a judge and is supposed to have said that one gets to the stage of wanting only to read P.G. Wodehouse, and nothing more. This from a towering academic who is also a published poet, one who speaks three languages and can read another nine.
Then there are the writers themselves, not to mention their fragile egos. In 1980 Anthony Burgess, whose novel Earthly Powers had been shortlisted, wanted to know the name of the winner in advance, because he said he had no intention of attending the announcement ceremony if William Golding (author long before of the famous Lord of the Flies) had won. The judges refused his request, Golding won with Rites of Passage, a story about a 19th century voyage to Australia, and Burgess flounced off to drown his sorrows at the bar of the Savoy Hotel.
'There are six contenders on the shortlist. Charlotte Wood is in third favourite position. The suspense must be wearing, but I imagine she is pleased by being on the shortlist, even if her luck stops there.'
What is the purpose of prizes, anyway? In the case of the American Presidency, the purpose and promise is that of gaining a great deal of power: the incumbent becomes the leader of the so-called free world, and can decide the fate of millions. Then there is the matter of money. The President is paid a comparatively modest amount, but the owner of a winning racehorse can become very rich. It can be argued that the real winners of the Booker Prize, however, are the publishers. Their houses gain prestige as well as money. But for many writers winning the Booker Prize is life changing.
Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie won the 1981 Booker Prize for his novel Midnight’s Children, a work of magical realism. At that stage the prize money amounted to ten thousand pounds. This was only a fraction of later amounts, but it was enough to allow Rushdie to leave his job with an advertising agency and begin writing full-time. In the years since then this novel has won the Booker of Bookers, a prize set up to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the prize in 1994. It also won the Best of the Booker in 2008, on the prize’s 40th anniversary. Rushdie has been nominated for the Booker seven times. Many writers keep on without recognition, but it is obvious that most prizes offer both encouragement and acknowledgement, even if they are only small ones. In 1994, Rushdie said that the Booker of Booker prize was the best thing that had happened to him as a writer. Prizes can also endow winners with a measure of status in the eyes of their peers and anybody who takes reading seriously. And of course, those aforementioned fragile egos are stroked.
To the mystification and disappointment of a great many people around the world, there was little waiting for the result of the American Presidential election: news of Kamala Harris’s defeat came very quickly. Even experts were confounded. Before the 2016 election, an Australian friend said he thought Trump ‘had a pretty good chance’ of winning. Later he told me that had he placed a reasonable bet, he could have been twenty thousand dollars richer. But although he knew something about betting (his father had been a keen racing man) he didn’t do it.
Some people, however, never miss an opportunity. I know little about betting (I’ve never even been to the Melbourne Cup) so I was surprised to learn that it is quite possible to bet on the result of such an election, and indeed I’ve just read that during the counting of the vote the odds on Trump winning on November 5 had soared to 62 per cent. One can also bet on the result of the Booker Prize.
This being the case, I was not surprised to learn that Percival Everett is the favourite. (But I suspect there might be an outcry from the radical feminist element if he becomes the winner.) There are six contenders on the shortlist. Charlotte Wood is in third favourite position. The suspense must be wearing, but I imagine she is pleased by being on the shortlist, even if her luck stops there. That placing is a tribute to her talent, persistence and hard work, and it is a certain bet that she is no Anthony Burgess, but a good sport instead.
Literary critics often seem to have boundless confidence. So I thought yesterday, when reading the predictions of one critic as to the winner of this prize. She robustly declared that of the six books on the Booker short list, only three were worth reading. These were James, Safe-Keep, and Orbital.
What about our Charlotte? I thought.
The critic had a point: Orbital is this year’s winner, and is the list’s only book written by a British writer, Samantha Harvey, who also becomes the first woman to win since 2019. It is a short book, with the plot involving the thoughts of six astronauts and cosmonauts during a single day on their journey through space. The novel has been described as a book about a wounded world and has been praised by the judges for its beauty and ambition and for the lyricism of its language. Harvey herself regards her novel as a kind of space pastoral.
The ’wounded world’ comment must explain at least some of the book’s appeal, given the threat of climate change. Harvey says she wrote the book during periods of lockdown, seeing similarities between the space travellers’ confinement and the restrictions enforced during the pandemic. She also says that she lost her nerve during the writing. Clearly she regained it.
Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.