Winners and losers

There seem to be more and more prizes for fiction every year. Good news for authors, then. But are they really so fortunate? Forget the JK Rowlings, Dan Browns and Stephen Kings of this world, and think of the ‘average’ writer – whoever that is. According to a recent survey, the top 10 per cent of writers account for 70 per cent of revenues, with under 14 per cent of authors making their living solely from writing. And apparently the average author income has been dropping over the past 15 years or so. So perhaps it’s better to pause before quitting the day job.

This year’s Booker Prize winner will be announced in November but, as Robbie Millen exclaimed in the Times, ‘What a shocker! Fire the Booker judges! How dare they produce a longlist so free of controversy?’ He thought that this year’s longlist of 13 books was ‘safe and sensible’ – unlike in previous years. Four authors have won the Booker twice – JM Coetzee (1983 and 1999), Peter Carey (1988 and 2001), Hilary Mantel (2009 and 2012) and Margaret Atwood (2000 and 2019). Mantel is not on the longlist for The Mirror and the Light but her novel did win this year’s Walter Scott prize for historical fiction. She was also on the British Book Awards fiction shortlist but was pipped at the post by Maggie O’farrell with Hamnet. Kazuo Ishiguro is on the Booker longlist with Klara and the Sun; he, too, has been a previous winner with The Remains of the Day (1989).

There are also the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Costa Book prize, the Mcilvanney Prize, the Portico Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction (Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half is shortlisted for this as well as for the Orwell Prize) … and so the prize lists go on. Inside this supplement, there may well be reviews of next year’s prize-winning authors’ work – both factual and fictional. My suggestion: get reading if not writing ...