How does one win a Booker prize?

Kameron Merritt

12 July 2008

Booker nominees see sales rocket as their works get mass promotion Sir Salman Rushdie's Midnight's kids has been selected from 6 stories as the Best of the Booker. What does it take to win a Booker-winning novel? Martyn Goff, who ran the prize for 35 years, asserts the key is literary tourism - taking the reader somewhere they're not acquainted with. "It's going to give folk knowledge and feeling about something they knew tiny about indeed" he explains. But also there should be an outline of something that almost all of us have no idea anything about - Rushdie with India as it was, that type of thing. Folk are really taken with that." 'Cracking story ' whilst pronouncing what constitutes a literary novel is hard enough, identifying what makes one a huge renouned hit is even harder.

Writers and publishers fantasise about world success to match Ian McEwan's amendment, Sebastian Faulks ' Birdsong, or Louis De Bernieres ' Captain Corelli's Mandolin. "If you observe the Da Vinci Code, it's a cracking story that goes on and on. I do not believe Dan Brown thought an horrible lot about how he announced to the tale. "When you read a book like amendment - a particularly renouned literary fiction - its form follows its function.

The tale is a forcing one, but how it's told is also necessary to the tale itself. "In the really early days of Booker, they just wished to manufacture a novel they believed would be good - now folk are attempting to write a Booker winner" he is saying. "It's become too enormous a factor." television central But writers like Tracy Chevalier say they don't seem to be the ones obsessive about awards. "I think writers for the most part just write what we would like to write" she is saying. More from research "But for publishers, it's so hard to sell a book out there any more. Too many books are broadcast, and folks are reading less. They are getting plenty of attention, as the booksellers put the books up at the front of the shop." For their part, booksellers say the trade is actually formed by TV. Since 2004, Channel four's Richard and Judy show has operated a book club, influenced by a corresponding concept on Oprah Winfrey In America. "But I feel a bit like it is not that spontaneous any more, sadly. I suspect the market is getting too tight for that.".