Prince Maurice Prize

The shortlist for the Prince Maurice Prize for Literary Love Stories was announced last night, Tim Lott is the President of the prize and John Sutherland is one of the Man Booker Prize judges. Edward Stourton interviewed them.

ES: Tim Lott, would it be fair to say that you tried to recognise writers who to some accept are excluded from the big prizes like the Man Booker.

TL: To some extent. I've always thought there's been something very cerebral and cold about the kind of principles that govern the Man Booker. I grew up at a time when books generally, and well-thought of books particularly, tended to be very intellectually clever but rather cold-hearted. I’m thinking of people like Ian McEwen and Martin Amis and Angela Carter, and this kind of tradition in British literature carries on to today, there is no critical acclaim for the English equivalent of writers like Anne Tyler and Carol Shields. Nick Hornby has never won a proper literary prize, nor has Sebastian Faulks, nor has Louis de Bernieres and we are trying to redress that balance.

ES: you are trying to recognise writers who warm your heart rather than necessarily stimulating your mind?

TL: I really hope they stimulate your mind as well. It’s about appealing to your emotional intelligence and about reaching you in an emotional way and not merely in a cerebral way. I think that’s an incredibly important part of literature. Someone like Dickens would have been at the heart of that and now I think he would not make the Booker shortlist.

ES: JS, you are a bunch of cold fishes?

JS: My heart bleeds for Nick Hornby and Sebastian Faulks who have become very rich on their novels. Prizes do what they say they do. The Man Booker Prize sets out as best it can to give a prize for the best novel published that year. Best is a very slippery term but I think that means by normal literary criteria, these may be cold and clinical as Tim says…

ES: Interesting that you say that literary criteria should be cold and clinical?

JS: Well, would you like an emotional brain surgeon?

ES Well, you’d quite like an emotional poet wouldn't you?

JS: They do try and strike a balance, they are not blind specialists on the Man Booker Prize, they try to be a representative selection of readers. It is difficult, this whole question of standards versus popularity…

TL: It's not a question of standards versus popularity, that's a complete red herring, and it's very interesting that you said you wouldn't want an emotional person to do brain surgery. This idea of it being surgically precise is exactly what the Man Booker is all about. That’s fine. But it's just a genre. And they should make it clear that that's what the genre is. There is a prejudice because the English literary middle-class is so emotionally constipated and they don’t have any emotional intelligence so often that one relies entirely on a kind of Sudoko puzzle of literature instead of what real great literature does which moves you and engages you and changes you in some way instead of simply doing a crossword puzzle.

ES: Is there some truth that you are looking at a particular section of great literature rather than across the piece?

JS: Absolutely - the Man Booker jury selects from 120 books, and that is a tiny sample.

ES: But do you think you might be missing good books because of that, genuinely great writing?

JS: Absolutely, there are many more good books published than get prizes… I regret that this does to some extent make losers.

TL: John seems completely happy with this state of affairs and it doesn't seem to bother him in the least. He is really saying that the status quo is completely acceptable – the Booker committee has a very narrow remit for a very narrow kind of writing and the idea that it’s the best book is very misleading indeed…