Industry awards are a sore point

Great to see the 2005 Booker Prize being won by Irish author John Banville's excellent novel about death and memory, The Sea. Particularly pleasing as it beat the favourites from those darlings of the literati Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro.

All the media hype around the Booker, and the Gramophone Awards for classical music, is great news as it means more books and CDs sold. But it does remind me of my days in book publishing when a maverick independent publisher told me: "Literary awards are like hemorrhoids, every arsehole should have one."

Cover image credit - Guardian Unlimited

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