Winning and Losing in the Literary Prize Game
‘As we six shortlisted authors were introduced, it occurred to me that this was what a heart attack feels like.’
In 1993, my first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year, at that time the most lucrative literary prize in Britain, at £20,000. I made my anxious way to London, to Hatchards bookshop in Piccadilly. Amongst a loud, jostling crowd, I chewed nibbles I was too nervous to swallow, and tried to make small talk though I couldn’t actually speak. My mouth was too dry.
As we six shortlisted authors were introduced, it occurred to me that this was what a heart attack feels like. You sweat uncontrollably, you’re dizzy, unable to stand up without leaning against a bookcase, you can’t breathe. You’re about to lose consciousness.
We were put out of our misery with the announcement of the winner: William Boyd for The Blue Afternoon. Relief gushed through my body. This was, I admit, short-lived, but the bitterness that followed was eased by a sop of £1,000 each to the five shortlisted losers. (The annual prize was abandoned forthwith, ostensibly as a cost-cutter by the newspaper, though I prefer to believe it’s because the Sunday Express was so embarrassed at having made the wrong choice.)
I returned to London a month or two later with, undoubtedly, a better chance of winning, for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. For one thing, the sub-category of First Novels had clearly limited the competition, and for another, the Authors’ Club had produced a shortlist of only three - a genuinely short shortlist - narrowing the odds nicely. Unfortunately, the other two, Nadeem Aslam and Rachel Cusk, had both produced brilliant novels, which, in my opinion, lengthened the odds unfairly.
The Authors’ Club kindly provided a slap-up lunch, which I was far too tense to eat. As for the other writers, one ignored the other two while those two made friends for life (though I’m not going to be so indiscreet as to say which was which.) After lunch, Nadeem Aslam was announced as the winner, and I went home to Oxford empty-handed, not to mention hungry.
There are wrong ways of doing things, and, as I now came to understand, there are right ways. A letter arrived informing me I was being given the Hawthornden Prize for In the Place of Fallen Leaves, and inviting me to a reception at the National Portrait Gallery, where I would be presented with a cheque for £5,000. (In 1993 this sum really meant something. It was more than I’d got as an advance for the book itself and I could live off it for six months, which meant six months of writing time to work on the difficult second novel. In addition, the prize-winner was offered time on a retreat at Hawthornden Castle.)
Read the full piece in our upcoming issue.
Tim Pears’s latest novel, Run to the Western Shore - a tale of quest and struggle set in Britain AD 72 – is published by Swift Press at £12.99
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