The labours of the book-prize juror
At The Guardian’s books blog, Claire Armitstead, who was a juror for this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize, asks the eternal question, “Just how many books should you read to judge an award?”
More specifically, Armitstead notes that this year’s Johnson jury was faced with 131 books submitted by publishers — and then “called in” 31 more titles that weren’t originally submitted.
So is the call-in system actually worth the extra work it generates? On the plus side, it enables prize juries to follow the buzz around books, and take in titles which the publishers might not have thought to submit for all sorts of reasons. (Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, the highest profile book ever to win the Guardian first book prize, was technically a call-in because it was only the second year of the prize and Penguin forgot to submit.)
On the minus side, it leads to all sorts of special pleading. This can be direct: before they’ve even started discussing the novels already entered, the Booker judges meet to discuss letters from publishers begging for extra titles to be accepted. It can also be indirect: a well-connected author being talked up by friends in high places.
Two weeks ago, I would have begged for call-ins to be banned. Today I’m not so sure. Without them, we wouldn’t have had Patrick French’s Naipaul biography on the shortlist.
(The shortlist, by the way, is covered here.)
This is all well and good, though Armitstead skirts the ever-thorny issue of how many books submitted to award juries are actually read in full. Presumably that means they all were in this case, but Quillblog can’t help thinking of Michael Kinsey.
Kinsey was a non-fiction judge for the U.S. National Book Award in 2002. In a hilariously honest Slate piece on his experiences, Kinsey started off with this: “My motives were ignoble – mainly vanity and a desire for free books – so, it served me right when the books started rolling in and I realized with horror that I was actually expected to read them: 402 in all.” He went on to openly state that he did not, in fact, read them all.
When jury chair Christopher Merrill cried foul, Kinsey retorted:
Chris Merrill, our chairman, says, “I read enough of each book to know whether it merited further consideration.” Me, too. Sometimes that was none at all.
