Lost and found | 22 May 2010

The winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize was announced this week. Tobias Hill, one of the judges, appraises the shortlist

By the time you read this, the Lost Man Booker Prize will have been announced. You may know the winner, in which case you have the advantage of me. Though I judged the prize from longlist through shortlist, whittling down 21 novels to six, the ultimate decision isn’t mine to make: like the special 2008 Best of the Booker, the Lost Man Booker 1970/2010 will be determined by public vote. I’m afraid I find myself begrudging you the privilege. Dear reader, I hope you’ve chosen well. I hope you’re satisfied.

In fact I’m hopeful that the public will make a decent choice, not only because they did so in 2008 (a fair, if unadventurous, Booker hat-trick for Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children), but because now, as then, they have some remarkable novels to choose from.

Conceived by Peter Straus (the Booker’s unofficial archivist), the Lost Man Booker corrects a glitch in the prize’s logs: initially awarded retrospectively, the Booker became a prize for best novel in year of publication in 1971, leaving 1970 Bookerless — but not bereft of novels worth the attention, as the six-strong Lost shortlist has made clear. One Nobel for Literature and Booker refusenik (Patrick White), one Booker (J.G. Farrell) and four Booker shortlistings (Nina Bawden, Shirley Hazzard, Muriel Spark and White, again) leaves only Mary Renault unrepresented elsewhere in the history of the prize; all of which might imply that the Lost Man Booker protests its sense of loss too much, but maybe not: how many people now read Patrick White? How many buy him? Publicity gimmick the Lost Booker may have been, but it was a gimmick worth employing.