Jason Cowley and the Booker

Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, 2001 Booker Prize Winner

In March the London Georgetown community had the opportunity to listen to Jason Cowley, 1997 Booker judge, speak about "The Glittering Prize: Booker and British Literary Culture" at the Travellers Club. Mr. Cowley is Literary Editor of the New Statesman, a weekly political and cultural magazine, and also a critic and writer to numerous publications in Europe and the United States, including The Observer and The New York Times.

In his talk, Jason Cowley discussed how the Booker Prize has created, in his words, "its own canon of contemporary postwar fiction." The Booker Prize in every year since 1969 has been awarded to an outstanding work of fiction, judged by a panel of Britain's leading critics, writers and academics. The winner receives a cash prize and both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a global audience and a dramatic increase in book sales. "The whole point of being a Booker judge" is "to get readers interested in serious fiction," Mr. Cowley remarked, and indeed the media attention and speculation about the judges' choices, as well as the judges' choices themselves serve to generate a tremendous amount of interest in the Booker selection and shortlist every year. According to Mr.Cowley, the Booker is notorious, it generates a huge amount of publicity, and does a great deal to promote serious fiction in a world where "to talk about and write about serious books is becoming increasingly difficult."