The VA celebrates the person Booker winners from the ...

Irvin Foster

04 September 2008

The write stuff : The VA celebrates the person Booker winners from past times forty years. In July this year Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Youngsters won a public vote to be named the Best of the Booker, the best novel to win the Booker Prize in the award's 40-year history. Midnight's Youngsters won the Booker Prize in 1981. It may be a work that is forty years in the making. Now, some three hundred of literary agent Peter Straus's 1,000-strong private collection of Man Booker-winning and shortlisted 1st editions will be showcased at an exhibition at the VA. The event celebrates forty years of one of the planet's leading literary prizes - the 2008 shortlist for which is published on nine Sep . Straus is the prize's honorary archivist, and his books form a major part of the exhibition.

Among the more elusive winners that he has traced is a 1st version of Stanley Middleton's Vacation , which took jointly with Gordimer's novel in 1974.

I try not to let the habit become an obsession, announces Straus, a literary agent and previous publisher. The prize hadn't actually taken off at this point and the print runs were little. There is also an uncorrected advance evidence titled Monaghan Day, later modified to Amongst Girls , by John McGahern ; it was shortlisted for the Booker in 1990. Straus was new to publishing when he commenced his search to source Booker 1st editions from across the world. He started with the Booker winners and then moved out to the shortlisted writers. I even searched for titles that had some connection with the Booker Prize but were not shortlisted. Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair was chosen in 1979 but the writer removed himself from the list, announcing it was for younger and less well-known writers. As Straus researched further, he would have liked to know why certain writers hadn't been shortlisted. I found out that John Fowles failed to permit his publisher to enter his books, the 1st eligible being The French Lieutenant's Lady . In 1974 the panel would have liked to shortlist John Le Carr's Tinker Tailor Infantryman Spy but again Le Carr failed to need his books entered. Straus, who is handling director of the literary agents Rogers, Coleridge and White, is still adding to his collection when he will be able to. Even the book after the book was shortlisted regularly gets a mention, so I possess a copy of that, too. His private highlights include an evidence of JG Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, which was Margaret Drabble's copy, complete with her signature.