Murnaghan Interview Professor A.C. Grayling Chair of Man Booker Prize
Sunday 12 October 2014
Murnaghan Interview Professor A.C. Grayling Chair of Man Booker Prize
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now the Man Booker Prize for Fiction is the Oscars I suppose of the book world and just getting shortlisted is an honour. Winning will bring you fame and fortune, you get £50,000 prize money for a start plus the boost in sales. Six books in the final shortlist, the winner will be announced this Tuesday and the man with the job of judging them is with me now, well rounding up the judges anyway, he is Professor Anthony Grayling, otherwise known as A. C. Grayling of course, the chair of the judges for this year’s Man Booker Prize, very good to see you Professor Grayling. You must be cross-eyed, you were saying before you came on air you had to plough through 156 novels.
PROF. ANTHONY GRAYLING: 156 novels in competition but this year fortunately we had some of these novels sent to us in trolley form quite early. When I was last a judge back in 2003 it was all physical manuscripts or books and we had much less time to read them.
DM: So you set about your task but expanded as well geographically this year and a bit of controversy about allowing the mighty Americans in.
PROF. ANTHONY GRAYLING: Yes, indeed, this year for the first time all fiction in English published in the UK so it includes anybody anywhere but of course it does let in the American authors and there was considerable controversy about that and people thought that the American literary scene would simply flood the prize. That hasn’t happened.
DM: Well talk to me about this shortlist, we’ve got a list of the six novelists here. I mean it’s just so broad, the subject matters and the styles which they’ve employed, how do you apply the judging process? First of all, what do you think about the quality?
PROF. ANTHONY GRAYLING: Well it was such a strong year, there were tremendous books in competition. One could think of forty or fifty books which another year might very well have ended up on the long list and had a jolly good chance of getting on to the shortlist so it was pretty tough even getting a long list and the discussions about these six novels, well for one thing it was like being a member of a very, very interesting book club because the contributions made by the other judges were wonderful. I mean it was a marvellous process but it was very difficult doing this and eventually we decided that we simply had to go with nothing other than, this was the standard anyway, nothing other than the quality of the books so the writing, the characterisation, the sense of stepping into a world when you open a book, of the insights you get when you step into a book and it was very surprising to us actually when we got our long list and looked at the authors, where they came from, whether they were men or women, we hadn’t thought about those things at all in advance, it was purely on quality and we were quite surprised that …
DM: You tried to read them almost blind but I asked about the criteria, do you just as judges – and we all have our own prejudices, our likes and dislikes, do you just pick books you like or can you actually pick a book that you don’t like but you think is challenging, it’s innovative, it’s broken the mould?
PROF. ANTHONY GRAYLING: Yes, because there are a number of different criteria. We talk about the excellence of the writing, that’s an obvious thing but it is also how the story is told, how the characters are portrayed, how multi-dimensional the book is, whether you feel that you have really entered into something that has been made real for you when you open the book and carry on reading it but it is also of course the innovation that you get sometimes with literature, different ways of telling stories, different approaches to the task of really informing somebody of the situation that the author wants to portray for you and because the panels of judges tend to be good readers, attentive, thoughtful and experienced readers, that’s the kind of thing that will capture them and strike them and they will see in them, those books, that they want other people to see too. In a way choosing these books is not simply a response, although mainly a response to the quality of the writing but it is also a recognition that literature is really something that moves on.
DM: And that’s the point, there’s no point questioning your belief in the power of literature. I just wanted to ask you a quick question about your namesake, the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling – I’m sure you’ve been asked this before – and this idea of banning books for prisoners, what do you think about that?
PROF. ANTHONY GRAYLING: Oh I think that’s a terrible idea. One of the great restitutive things that can happen when people are imprisoned for committing crime would be to give them an opportunity to reflect, to read, to enlarge their sympathies about other lives, other experiences which is wonderfully what literature does. Literature is windows into ways of living and experiences that you yourself might never have and so to enlarge that capacity is something we should be doing, we should be sending more books into prisons.
DM: There we are, passionate as ever. So all will be revealed on Tuesday night, do you know the result yet?
PROF. ANTHONY GRAYLING: No, we decide that on Tuesday itself.
DM: Okay, well some debate still to come. Professor Grayling, good to see you, A.C. Grayling there on the Man Booker Prize.