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Ah, England: Where Book-Prize Jurors Can Cause a Stir

by Zoe Strimpel
Tue, 18 Dec 2007 at 4:20 PM

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Michael Portillo, the Conservative politician and journalist who was tipped for top but never quite got there, has been announced chairman of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction judging panel in 2008. Mr. Portillo, onetime defense secretary under John Major (a post in which he made the gaffe of urging the Conservative Party to copy the British Army's Special Air Service), is perhaps most famous for the moment in 1997 when he lost his Enfield parliamentary seat. Mr. Portillo's loss became an emblem for the death of the Tories and the rise of Labour (Tony Blair went on to win in a landslide victory). An attention-grabbing choice, then, by the Booker committee.

Other judges are the deputy editor of Granta literary magazine, Alex Clark, the novelist Louise Doughty, the comedian Hardeep Singh Kohli, and the founder of Ottakar's bookshops, James Heneage. Last year the panel trawled through 117 books before coming up with a long list. This year's long list of 12 or 13 will be announced in August, the short list of six in September, and the winner on October 14.

Elsewhere in the fiction-prize world, the judging panel for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction was announced last week. Some raised eyebrows as Lily Allen was confirmed. Apparently best-selling "Labyrinth" author Kate Mosse, the award's co-founder, liked her for her youth appeal and the fact that her godmother is the novelist Susie Boyt. Laments about the running together of mass entertainment and commerce with the higher arts were to be expected and possibly understood. What was less expected were the (sadly, probably false) rumors circulating today that the committee meant to ask Lily Cole, the Cambridge-bound supermodel, but got them mixed up.

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