Book Awards and Prizes

Ion Trewin, long time employee of Orion, editor of a Booker winner (Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally), former chair of the Booker, and present administrator. Ion is also an author himself (mostly non-fiction/political).

Danuta Reah, crime fiction writer, who also writes with the pseudonym Carla Banks. Danuta is former chair of the Crime Writers Association, and presently on the board. She won the Short Story Dagger in 2005.

The Man Booker Prize is one of the most influential book prizes to win and it represents the very best in contemporary fiction. Ion Trewin followed Martyn Goff earlier this year in becoming its administrator. Goff had almost invented the Booker prize having run it for the last 36 years (the prize has been running for 38), so he was, commented Ion, a rather tough act to follow.

The prize was actually inaugurated by Tom Maschler in 1968, when no other prize seemed to have such influence over the reading public. Today, winning the Man Booker Prize almost guarantees a huge increase in sales and the prize winner can be sure of fame as well as fortune. Success can be partly fuelled by controversy, as indicated by Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, the all time best selling winner; the novel’s reception was highly ambivalent as the critics weren’t sure whether what they were reading was fact or fiction. Kiran Desai, the most recent recipient of the Booker Prize, is now number four in the bestseller chart, indicating the great power of the accolade. Maschler hoped that the prize would be “something they could be proud of” and he certainly has achieved this goal.

The Man Booker winner receives £50,000, with £2,500 going to the runners up on the shortlist. However, the most important aspect of the prize should be the quality of the judging. The committee of judges is made up of some of the finest critics, academics and writers in the country. Hermione Lee was the chair of this year’s Man Booker and she ensured that each judge read everything and re-read it. This meant that the final six novels selected were the ones they really believed in.

The Orange prize is probably the next most influential award after the Booker; it is arguably the most important prize awarded for the best English language novel written by a woman. The Whitbread (now Costa) prize is also influential but the multitude of prizes awarded makes the winners less definitive than the Booker winner. The Samuel Johnson prize is the biggest prize for non-fiction but it is vastly under-funded.

The Daggers are awarded solely for crime writing and the only requirements for entry are that the novel or story contains a crime and that it is a very good read! Past winners have been current bestselling authors such as John Le Carre and Ian Rankin. The prize helped to introduce these names to a wider audience and generate great publicity for the authors and their books.