My fellow judges the writers Shena Mackay and Natasha Walter certainly made a compellingly powerful case for Anita Desai’s twin novellas Fasting

My fellow judges, the writers Shena Mackay and Natasha Walter, certainly made a compellingly powerful case for Anita Desai’s twin novellas Fasting, Feasting: a depth of enthusiasm made public when Desai was (unusually) named as runner-up by our chairman, Gerald Kaufman MP.However, Walter and Mackay also felt incensed enough by Sutherland’s version of events to write to The Guardian complaining that he “not only breached the trust of his fellow judges” but “also strays into pure fantasy”. Walter and Mackay added that “We would like to dissociate ourselves from his self-serving gossip, which does not give anything like a true picture of the real passions and arguments of the judges”. Amen to that.Sutherland’s taste for elaboration went further. About Ahdaf Soueif’s shortlisted Egyptian epic The Map of Love, he wrote that “its anti-Zionist sentiments made some members of the committee slightly uneasy”.

If so, the good professor must count mind-reading among his many creative skills As far as I know nothing was ever said to this effect. Besides, to label Soueif’s nuanced portrait of the conflicting ideals that challenged British domination in early 20th-century Egypt as an “anti-Zionist” book is itself a rather ugly misrepresentation.Burdened by this questionable record, Sutherland will have to captain the usual mutinous Booker ship in an especially decisive year. Many of the big beasts of English-language fiction have new novels due in the coming months, from Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie (all of them previous winners) to Zadie Smith and William Boyd.Other prizes, such as the Orange and Whitbread, regularly raise their game in the fields of funding, promotion and spin-off activities. Meanwhile, the new International Man Booker Prize, which rewards a career-long achievement and for the first time allows United States authors into the Booker fold, is currently in the middle of its first – extremely demanding – judging cycle.The Man Group, the City hedge-fund wizards who now finance the award (while its administration remains impeccably independent), will be looking for impressive returns on their generous investment.

He has recorded them in prize-winning films and books like The Brendan Voyage, his much-reprinted 1978 account of sailing the North Atlantic in a tiny leather boat in the footsteps of the sixth-century Irish saint reputed to have discovered North America

Adventurers cut quite a dash in our imaginations. When this hero cries “Enough!” it’s in the tone of trying to stop someone from continuing with a killing joke.Not a great production, but a masterly Macbeth.. Kay Adshead’s career is becoming exemplary in the wrong fashion – an object lesson in how writing deteriorates when an admirable talent for political indignation directs itself against less and less specifically delineated targets. “My readers have grown to expect me to be matter-of-fact, but in fiction you must write about people and emotions. That is new to me and a little unsettling when you are used to keeping such emotions out of the narrative”.So why has Severin taken on a challenge that seems to go against both his personal predilections and his public pigeonhole? Commercial reasons may have played a part Historical fiction is very fashionable indeed.