Why Claire Malcolm's been boning up on the Booker Prize
A new literary first for Newcastle
Claire Malcolm saved the longest of the Booker Prize-shortlisted novels until last and had reached page 150 of Kiran Desai’s 688-pager when she rang me from a London-bound train.
As founding chief executive of New Writing North, Claire has good reason to want to be familiar with all the contenders before the winner is announced at a ceremony in London.
The following Thursday, she is due to interview the winning novelist on stage at the Tyneside Cinema. Which of the six it’s to be won’t be revealed until after that dinner on Monday night (November 10).
“I will be there and I’m so excited,” she said.
“I was invited to the International Booker Prize announcement in May and it blew my mind.
“These events are attended by the top echelons of literary life and there were people there who knew about our plans for a Centre of Writing in Newcastle and were really interested.
“We are easing ourselves onto the literary map in a way that wasn’t happening a few years ago.”
How come the winner of this prestigious prize – worth £50,000 but much more in terms of public profile and generated sales – is to travel to Newcastle just days after a potentially life-changing announcement?
“We’ve been talking to Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, about how we might work with them,” said Claire.
“They do a lot of different things. They also do the International Booker Prize and they’ve just launched plans for a new Children’s Booker Prize for next year (the first winner to be announced in 2027).
“But they usually do one event with the new Booker Prize winner outside London. I was telling them what we’re planning in the North East and they suggested doing it with us.”
Tickets are on sale for the event at the Tyneside and the chance to see Claire chatting to… well, who?
The novels on the shortlist are: The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (published by Faber); Audition by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press); Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape); The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (Sceptre); Flashlight by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape); and Claire’s train journey read, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sammy by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton).
They’re all very different. Brief descriptions of subject and plot can be found on the comprehensive Booker Prize website.
Clearly all have their merits and pitting one against another might seem daft. But there’s always a buzz around the Booker. It’s the one occasion when bookmakers take an interest in literature but it seems this year there’s no clear favourite.
The Kiran Desai novel, which Claire was enjoying but admitted it was probably the one she would have been least likely to buy, seems well fancied but could that be because the US-based Indian author is the shortlist’s only previous Booker winner (in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss)?
“Two of the books I’d read anyway because they’re by authors I really like,” said Claire.
“David Szalay won the Gordon Burn Prize (which New Writing North runs) a few years ago so I’m a big fan of his writing.
“And Benjamin Markowits used to be a basketball player so we had him as writer-in-residence once at Durham Cricket Club.
“It didn’t completely work because the two sports aren’t that well aligned but he’s a brilliant writer and his novels are quite rare.”
Claire reads a lot, as you’d imagine, but she said she couldn’t imagine the task which confronted the Booker judges who had to whittle down 153 novels to get to a shortlist.
“I don’t know how they do that and have any love for the novel left in them. Roddy Doyle, who’s chairing the judging panel, said in an interview he’d read some terrible novels.
“But I’m always reading things that I love but other people don’t and there seem to have been very different responses to this list.”
Claire said she usually does read the Booker Prize winner even if she doesn’t make a point of reading all the shortlisted titles.
“I think you have to pay attention to it because it’s a prize that demands that. It’s a group of well-read people surveying the terrain and saying these are books worth reading.
“And I know from the prizes we run that judges take that work really seriously. You can’t fiddle your way onto a shortlist. Places are hard won.
“This time I’ve read the shortlisted books once but the judges will have read them two or three times and talked to each other about them in great detail.”
As for whether a Booker-winning story is going to brighten your day… well, I’ve read one or two that could curdle milk.
But it seems Claire’s not averse to a dystopian wander so long as the writing’s good and the pages turn.
“I read the Paul Lynch book (the bleak Prophet Song, Booker winner in 2023) which I thought was very good although it’s really depressing,” she said brightly.
“I read it over Christmas.
“I’m sure Booker winners are meant to be books people would enjoy reading but I think it’s more like these are books that might tell you something about where the novel’s at this year and the current concerns of literary culture.
“And you can learn so much from them. The Susan Choi book fascinated me because it’s all about a guy brought up in Japan who’s kidnapped by North Korea.
“Not only is it a gripping family drama set across America, Japan and Korea, but it educated me so much about a part of history I didn’t know anything about.”
Claire might get the chance to quiz the American novelist about that at the Tyneside Cinema. But at this stage, who knows?
Tickets for the event on Thursday, November 16 (6pm) can be bought via the Tyneside Cinema website.
A final word from Claire, before she resumed her reading and her rain journey, on the proposed new Centre of Writing.
“I hope we’ll be in a position to make a big announcement next spring,” she said.
This is one story everyone hopes will have a happy ending.