BRITAIN:Orange award organisers in the UK have taken the rare step of including Booker and Costa winners on their longlist, writes John Ezardin London
Organisers of the top literary prize for women novelists took the rare step yesterday of including the winners of the recent Man Booker and Costa prizes in their field of contenders for this year's honour.
Judges of the £30,000 (€44,000) women-only Orange Broadband fiction award broke with a 39-year unspoken convention in the prize world by choosing Kiran Desai's novel The Inheritance of Loss and Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves on their longlist of 20 books. They are understood to be free to pick either title for their shortlist or as the eventual Orange winner.
In picking Desai and Penney, the judges underline a remarkable year for female writers. Whoever finally wins the Orange on June 6th, women will have scooped all three major UK literary awards.
But the decision goes far beyond this. None of the richer awards since the first of them, the Booker, was founded in 1968 has gone to a book which has previously won a sizeable rival award. Few if any have gone to titles shortlisted or longlisted for a rival.
"No prize committee wants to come second," one of the most seasoned ex-judges said yesterday. The same feeling has been held to apply to sponsors, without whose six-figure sponsorship the awards would cease overnight. Booksellers and publishers tend to prefer the huge sales boosts from awards to be shared between several titles. However, the reading public would gain if there was more of a consensus among the prizes on the best books of the year.
Yesterday Martyn Goff, administrator of the Booker prize from its beginning until early this century, said: "In all those years, I can never remember a discussion among the judges of a book which had won another prize."
The Orange's founder and honorary director, Kate Mosse, said the judges had been told that they must forget whether any of the titles had been successful in any other field. "What a book has done outside the judges' room is utterly irrelevant. This applies equally strongly at the shortlist stage and in choosing the winner. Nothing matters except the quality between the pages. Whether the sponsors have views on which books should win or not is never discussed. Orange totally supports the independence of the judging process."
The judges' chair, broadcaster Muriel Gray, said: "It is a preposterous idea that we would censor a book because it has won another prize."
The other judges are historian Kathryn Hughes, critic Maya Jaggi, and authors Marian Keyes and Kate Saunders. When Desai's novel won the Man Booker in October, the chair of judges, Hermione Lee, said: "It is a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness."
Armando Iannucci, the Costa judges' chair, said of Penney's novel: "We felt that this was not just an extraordinary first novel but also an extraordinary novel." Rodney Troubridge, Waterstone's fiction buyer, described the Orange selection as "possibly the strongest longlist for any award I've seen in some years - the best of the Booker and Costas, even the Richard and Judy list."
The list also features three authors who have previously been Orange-shortlisted: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jane Smiley and Anne Tyler, eight first novelists, and the 23rd novel by Margaret Forster, author of the swinging 60s title Georgy Girl and 11 works of non-fiction.