My Top Ten Man Booker Moments

I was privileged enough to go the (Man) Booker prize dinner for 11 years in a row. Here are my favourite memories.

1997 - The God of Small Things

My first year; I was overwhelmed by the scale of the event and blown away by the grandeur of the Guildhall with its gigantic statues of Gog and Magog standing sentinel. Arundhati Roy glowed with stardom and gave a heartfelt, gracious speech. Less thrillingly, Madeleine St John's shortlisted title The Essence of the Thing was my first Booker 'huh??'

1999 - Disgrace

The year I learnt an important lesson: if you're going to the dinner, try to read at least some of the books. It's embarrassing to wing it when you're a literary editor. I was placed on a table of charming Booker employees who had read all the shortlisted titles and wanted some top-flight critical discussion from me. I still haven't read J M Coetzee's masterpiece but to this day I remember the passionate debate: Is it misogynist? Yes... no... Yes... NO...

2000 - The Blind Assassin

So this year I invented a new Booker tradition: read five shortlisted books, run out of time and then find that it's the one you haven't read that wins. Tchah! The shortlist was chiefly memorable for The Deposition of Father McGreevy, otherwise known as 'the sheep-shagging novel'. I'm afraid so.


2001 - The True History of the Kelly Gang

The first year the longlist was published. I was, and remain dubious about this, but apparently it's 'good for sales'. Cracking shortlist this year, including McEwan, Andrew Miller (Oxygen), David Mitchell's stunning Number9Dream and Ali Smith's Hotel World. But I hadn't read the Carey. The long tables a la Hogwarts were uncomfortably crammed: Booker was outgrowing the Guildhall. As we all sat down I asked Ali how she felt. 'I'm just so pleased to be here AT ALL,' she beamed. The best moment for me this year actually came after the dinner, when I sloped off with my friend, Michele Roberts, one of the judges, and sat on her rooftop overlooking the Thames drinking red wine. I also discovered that knowing one judge does not necessarily mean you know in advance what the winner is going to be. I got the impression Michele thought the voting was going to go a different way...

2002 - Life of Pi

My memorable moment came long before Booker night. I was loafing around the Groucho club late
one night when a familiar tousled-haired figure hoved into view. Barely listening to the usual impassioned spiel, I let Jamie Byng of Canongate shove an advanced readers' proof into my hands. Months later it was still lying around unread, some book with a tiger in a boat on the cover. Eventually I read it and... wow!

This was the year the dinner moved to the British Museum, presumably for space reasons. While having the champagne reception among the Egyptian sculptures was fabulous, once dinner started it was hard to hear anything with the appalling acoustics (the tables were laid out in the central court, around the old reading room). 'And... (crackle) the (mumble crackle) is... (inaudible).' When Martel switched to French in his acceptance speech, it wasn't much more incomprehensible than his English over all the static. But how we cheered plucky little Canongate.

2003 - Vernon God Little

Back at the BM, announcements still inaudible. This year the organisers decided, unwisely, to focus on the judging process rather than the books, screening a short film showing A C Grayling reading on holiday, Francine Stock unpacking boxes of books, D J Taylor looking thoughtful... yes, yes, judging is NOT INTERESTING, please move on. I also remember a quote from the mountaineer judge Rebecca Stephens along the lines of 'I'm looking for a novel that makes me feel emotion'. It's not a great criterion, is it? I mean, Hitler made people feel emotion. As the announcements began, all the hacks left their tables and thundered to the front, cupping their palms round their ears. That crazy scamp DBC Pierre won.

2004 - The Line of Beauty

The concourse at Victoria Station presumably not being available, the ceremony moved, for one year only, to the vast and atmosphere-free Royal Horticultural Halls. Toibin, Mitchell and Hollinghurst were the favourites, my fellow Indy on Sunday writer (and judge) Rowan Pelling wore an eye-popping low-cut frock, and glamorous Sarah Hall (shortlisted for The Electric Michelangelo) created a stir with her tattoo-baring outfit. I was gutted about Mitchell (still am), but LOB was a worthy winner. It's a great year when there are three masterpieces on the shortlist.

2005 - The Sea

Possibly my finest Man Booker hour, and the only time I have been placed next to a winner. Not that anyone on the Picador table thought John Banville was in with much of a chance, what with Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ali Smith and Sebastian Barry to contend with. This was probably the best shortlist in all my Booker years (unimpeachably high-brow literary judges, that's why). The mood on the table was gloomy, relieved by the occasional comment such as: 'It's a great achievement to get this far, John. Just think of it like that.'

I wasn't even at his side when the announcement was made: I was up on the balcony doing a piece to camera for Kirsty Wark. We all leaned dramatically over to hear the result, only to see the table I had just been sitting at erupt with joy. Damn! Banville was swept into superstardom - you couldn't get near him at his Groucho club aftershow party - and I didn't see him again for a whole year, when his publishers had a reunion lunch. He was kind enough to say that everyone who'd been on the table that night was part of the magic. John, you are a gent and my favourite ever Man Booker winner!

2006 - I can't even bring myself to say

The announcement was made and moments later Edward St Aubyn and his entire contingent (including the actress Maria Aitken) rose and icily swept out of the room. Spotting Alan Hollinghurst, I did a Munch's The Scream face and he said, 'I know. SHIT HAPPENS.' My deputy texted me the single word 'Noooooo!'

Usually the losers' parties are tumbleweed affairs, but that night it seemed like everyone stopped by to commiserate with Teddy. Eventually the room became so starry it was like a winner's party after all. There was even an odd moment when one of the judges turned up to apologise to the stony-faced St Aubyn. A surreal evening.

2010 - The Finkler Question

Bit of a jump, but I have no strong memories of the years White Tiger or The Gathering won, beyond meeting the extraordinary Indra Sinha, author of Animal's People and talking to Adiga's publisher beforehand, who confessed, 'We're trying to calm him down. He really thinks he's going to win.' And I unfortunately missed the Wolf Hall dinner.

The winner announcements are always dramatic, and you can instantly tell from the atmosphere when they've got it 'right'. You could really feel the love for Howard Jacobson. (As opposed to the 2006 announcement when it felt like all the energy had suddenly drained out of the room.) I even managed to grab hold of Howard's trophy and pose for a photo. I wonder what this year's Man Booker moment will be?

Happy National Poetry Day!

Last night I went to the Forward Prize party at Somerset House in London, to see John Burnside win Best Collection for Black Cat Bone (Cape) and Rachael Boast the Best First Collection for Sidereal (Picador). No one could quite agree how to pronounce that one: Cider-real? Sigh-DEAR-re-ul? Sidder-real? So I asked Boast. Then promptly forgot what she'd told me. However you say it, it's an excellent collection. I had a brief conversation with the waifish poet in her stylish hat, trying to explain what appealed to me about her work. 'Yes, a lot of people like the poems about lying around on hillsides, drinking,' she observed.

One of the judges, Lady Antonia Fraser, was hunting round the room for Andrew Wyeth, author of a poem (it's in the Forward Book of Poetry 2012) entitled 'Pinter's Pause'. I'm not sure she ever found him, but she did track down Leeds poet John Whale, whose collection Waterloo Teeth (Carcanet), shortlisted for best debut, had a poem about Marie Antoinette. I loved this book, clever and cultured and steeped in the era of the Romantics, with pieces about Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine, and the grisly title poem: 'we fell upon the rain-soaked bodies of the dead /... From the rosy cheeks of English plough-boys / we pulled two hundred sets of perfect teeth.'

Then it was off for a grand dinner under the painted eyes of Horatio Nelson, to celebrate two decades of the Forward Prizes. The supremely generous and dedicated founder William Sieghart recollected that an early 'best collection' winner was Thom Gunn with The Man With Night Sweats, a rapid poetic response to Aids that bore out Sieghart's contention that poetry tackles issues more quickly than other art forms. My seat was marked 'Don Paterson OBE' (he'd had to go), which tickled me. Andrew Motion, chair of the judges, whose speech was read in absentia, remarked on the poetry scene's internecine warfare this year. Judith Palmer and Fiona Sampson of the imploding Poetry Society seemed to be grimly avoiding one another. Let's hope it's all calming down now.

I recently reviewed five new anthologies for the Independent on Sunday, including the Forward Prize volumes (including Poems of the Decade), two from Salt Publishing, The Salt Book of Younger Poets and The Best British Poetry 2011, and Michael Hulse and Simon Rae's massive undertaking, The 20th Century in Poetry, 800 pages and over 400 poems.

One major theme of the Hulse/Rae volume is war. It was experienced at first hand by the poets of WWI but as the century marches on, there's a significant cultural shift with great implications for poetry. 'John Forbes,' they say, 'observes the Gulf War of 1991 from the perspective most of us now share, that of the television viewer.' Forbes's 'Love Poem' is a rather subtle and clever piece; however, this phrase sent me into flashback mode. At the Independent on Sunday, I regularly used to get poems from readers, usually with an urgent note to say that as they were topical, could I ensure they got into the very next issue? One writer took compliance so for granted that he added testily: 'I expect to be paid your normal rate.' With a sinking heart, I would read the poems. They were usually from 'the perspective most of us now share'.

A paraphrase might go something like this:

Bread

I am in my kitchen, kneading dough, thinking how good it will taste when baked, and how much my family enjoy eating my home-made bread. I cover it and leave it to rise and start watching the one o'clock news.

Oh no! I see scenes of carnage in a market somewhere in the middle east! Terrorists have blown up lots of women who were queueing for ... bread. That's ironic, isn't it? I feel quite sad about my bread now. Why should I bother baking it (writing poems) in a world where that happens? What's the point of it all? I really feel very depressed.

And then I think - I WILL bake bread (write poems) after all. I will bake it in defiance of the terrorists. I will bake it for all the women who can't bake bread (or write poems), all over the world. I will do it in solidarity with them. Slice by slice, the world will become a slightly better place. My family really are going to enjoy this lovely home-baked bread...

My little paraphrase sounds mocking - actually some of these poems were rather good. They were just eerily unoriginal, and their authors were sublimely unaware of it. Perhaps it's because poetry's antennae operate so sensitively that they can pick up virtually the same vibration in several different places at once. I wonder whether these strange little news-item poems are still being written? After all, it's what the Poet Laureate's for...