Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

The individual was a certain Scotsman called Jock Campbell who in 1945 became managing director of the Booker Company which then had most of its business in Guyana. He was also a humanitarian who deplored the wrongs and hurts of slavery. An astute businessman, he was able to transform the company from a typical colonial business into a thriving enterprise. The birth of the Booker Prize came one day when Jock Campbell learnt that Ian Fleming, an old friend of his and golf partner, was given not more than a year to live. Fleming asked his friend Jock about the way he could secure his estate for his family by selling his interest in the James Bond novels. The two made a deal through the Booker Company and the result was the start of the Booker's Authors Division. It soon added to Fleming other writers like Agatha Christie, Dennis Wheatley, Georgette Heyer, Robert Bolt and Harold Pinter.

What is interesting is that the Booker Prize took its inspiration from the then famous French Goncourt prize, but after its establishment the original French prize came to be called the French Booker. This shows how the Booker Prize has become one of the most famous and widely discussed literary prizes in the world.

At first the prize was sponsored by the Booker and the Publishers Association. The management committee consisted of representatives of both Booker and the Publishers Association. Now the committee is composed of two publishers, hardback and paperback, an author, a librarian, a bookseller, plus Booker directors and executives. The committee's main tasks were to frame and revise the rules and choose the judges every year. There are five judges as a rule, one of whom is designated chairman. Every title submitted would be considered by all judges, changed every year.

The prize is for the best novel written in English by a Commonwealth or Irish citizen and published in the United Kingdom. The inclusion of the Commonwealth reflects Booker's interest. Among the winners were P.H. Newby in 1969. Newby worked for a number of years as a lecturer at Cairo University and wrote four novels with an Egyptian background. In 1971 the prize went to V.S. Naipul, an Indian writer; Nadine Gordimer, the well known liberal South African writer won the prize in 1974. Salman Rushdie won in 1981; in 1987 Penelope Lively won the prize for her Moon Tiger, a novel set in Egypt and England and in 1997 the prize went to the young Indian writer Arundhati Roy.

Martyn Goff, bookseller and novelist, looks back on 25 years as the prize's administrator, which means that with an average of 100 entries a year he has now read over 2,500. He is interviewed by Ian Trewin who writes: "Looking back there is no doubt that the Booker Prize has changed the market of literary fiction in Britain. Before Booker many literary novels failed to go into paperback. But Peter Mayer, who arrived from America as Chief Executive of Penguin in 1978, changed all that. Penguin brought most of the short list out in paperback."

This year the British Council is starting a new project. A Mirror Booker Prize committee is formed in Cairo from leading writers and critics. We have already received the six short-list books which we are supposed to finish reading by 25 October when the committee meets in both London and Cairo to select the winner.