Book award
Sir: I hate to fall out with my old friend Susan Hill, whose writing I have always admired, but her letter (17 February) about the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award is a very silly one.
She says that Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker Prizewinning novel The Remains of the Day is 'a small masterpiece' and so a worthy Booker winner, but that although it is 'beautifully written and astonishingly readable too' it 'did not seem to me to be the right book to win the Sunday Express Award.'
Why not? The Award is given annually for exactly that sort of book, a novel that is stylish and intelligent but also compulsively readable. Yet Susan did not even nominate it for our 1989 Award even though she was not only one of the judges but also one of the nominating panel, which entitled her to nominate no fewer than three novels for the prize.
She did indeed nominate three novels, but none of them was The Remains of the Day. It was in fact nominated by someone else but none of the judges, not even Susan herself, suggested that it should even be shortlisted. When the judges — who in- cluded Roald Dahl, Clare Francis and Auberon Waugh as well as Susan and I — came to compile the shortlist, the Ishiguro was very quickly ruled out as simply not being sufficiently impressive and not worthy of a major prize.
Graham Lord Literary Editor, Sunday Express
Ludgate House, 245 Blackfriars Road, London SE1
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