The first time I was asked to judge the Booker Prize, I said no. I was too busy with my day job here at Prospect, and desperately wanted to finish a novel that I had spent years working on. Three years later, the call came again. I still had the job and was starting my second book. Oh, and my wife and I were expecting our first baby in January. But this time I couldn’t refuse: you don’t get asked three times. On the day the press release announced that I was one of five judges—the others being our chair, publisher Margaret Busby, thriller-writer Lee Child, poet Lemn Sissay and classicist Emily Wilson—our baby daughter arrived. Forty-eight hours later, I was sitting in an oversized hospital chair with an infant in the crook of one arm and book number one in the other—the first of 162 that I read in the next few months, at a rate of one a day.
Why take on the Booker? There was an element of professional relish—and ego, I suppose. As a literary journalist, I have been hanging round the Prize for a decade or so, lauding or lamenting the winner, gossiping at the fancy Guildhall dinner about what really went down in the meeting room, and which judge had holidayed that summer with the winning author. It was about time I got properly involved. It was also an unrepeatable chance to take a satellite photo of the state of the novel in English. How were authors telling their stories? How did the increased scope of the prize—since 2014 it has been open to American and non-Commonwealth entries, so long as they are published in the UK or Ireland—alter the landscape? I would also enjoy testing my critical faculties against an intimidatingly eminent set of fellow judges.