Booker Prize 2012 BBC News Special

Welcome to London's magnificent Guildhall. We will surely find out

who is the winner of the Man Booker Prize, worth �50,000 to the win and

so much more. Could it be Hilary Mantel, who won in 2009 and could

be the first woman to win twice? Or could it be one of two first-time

novelists. But first, let's look at the short list drawn somewhere list

To guide us through this evening's proceedings I am joined by the

winner of the Booker Prize in 1991, and Gabby with, the book's editor

at the Daily Telegraph. What difference did it make to you to

win the prize? Well, I am going to smile first because it made an

enormous difference. I came into this dinner with everyone saying I

didn't stand a chance. Another author said to me, Ben, you are not

going to win so enjoy yourself. good attitude! If and then my name

was announced and it was like being slapped on the back of their head

with a beautiful kiss! It completely transforms the writer's

life. It introduces an intensity of gays and even changes the way you

right. It raises the temperature. Why? Because you have to live up to

something? I think it is because you cannot write the same way any

more. You just can't. You must change and evolve. For some people

it feels like the end of the game. For me, it was the beginning and it

opened by career and my writing arm. Gabby, two writers have said it is

a lottery because you have different judges every year and

different competitors with different moods and different

beliefs. It is very difficult to judge this, I would have thought?

Absolutely. Almost impossible. The novel form has so many different

forms and exponents so you even feel you are not comparing like

with like. If you feel, should it possibly not be up like the cost of

prize, comparing a novel with a biography with poetry? And it is

already very difficult to see two things which are in different

genres. People have been talking about Hilary Mantel and the sequel

to Wolf Hall. And also Will Self's book Umbrella. Which is completely

different. There couldn't be two more different books to read?

they are so different but you can make a link between them. Will

Self's book makes history more non- linear and Hilary Mantel's book

brings it to life in this incredible wave. I think one is and

one is micro. Yes. But the basic human desires and frailties and

wickedness is absolutely the same? I think that is one of the most

important things about the novel. It can telescope deeper into the

human spirit as if you were looking at the stars... These urges, the

technology of humanity doesn't change. If anything, time actually

makes us more ourselves. And the novel is a particularly powerful

lens for studying all of these secret aspects of what it is to be

human and a wonderful thing about this short list is we get different

kinds of lenses, both in terms of technique and subject. Absolutely.

Something which strikes me as well is that Hilary Mantel is much loved

him Britain in particular because she strikes a particular chord here.

Will Self has gorilla Miras but Umbrella is quite tricky. It will

be off-putting to some people. -- has some admirers. It is not an

easy read. I think he is set in a challenge to the reader. But having

said that, you get past the first ad pages and it really picks up

momentum and becomes a very simple book. -- 80 pages. They are simple,

beautiful descriptions of a book that's only somebody very

complicated good spot. It is a real feat. I think the difference here

is that it is slightly modelled on Ulysses bowl with Ulysses you begin

with clarity and move towards complication. -- but with Ulysses.

Whereas with swirls -- with Will Self, you begin with complication

and move towards clarity. And then we have The Garden Of Evening Mists.

It is about hating the Japanese war and coming to terms with history.

Yes, a different approach and a very poetic approach. At I liked it

very much and in many ways, it is one of my favourites. I liked the

tranquillity of his aesthetic pursuit at the heart of the book.

It really is a book about beauty and about the garden transforming

pain and the wounds of history. So finally if it is about those

intangible sensations of life and it does so with a prose that is

very quiet and suddenly leaps out. There is a line when a character

talks about gardening being a kind of deception and, which is the

novel, obviously, but that kind of beauty and the simplicity also

become a love-story and it is quite extraordinary. Did you find that?

Is used somebody would be familiar with or is it something the Booker

Prize does well, which is make us wake up to somebody we did not know

about? Yes. I am ashamed I didn't know about him. I hadn't read his

previous book and this one I thought was extraordinary. But as

you say, it is the role of the prize to bring these things to

one's attention. I particularly liked the garden as a metaphor for

fiction as well. Now, Narcopolis, about an area of Mumbai. Completely

different from the other books we have talked about. For reading this

book was thinking about how people were calling this short list and

experiment. -- reading this book I was thinking. It is about a state

of city, a state of mind, an altered state, if you like, and

doing that through language. It is incredible he makes us do that and

takes us to an incredibly different world. And the way he sustains that

poetic intensity where nothing intrudes. It is very quiet and

densely worked and that the same time it is a page-turner because

what you're interested in is not so much the story as the psychosis or

neurosis of drug addiction. And the rhythm of it. Yes. But also what

interested me was the junkie and even the confessions of an op-ed

dealer is that dealing with this, other people's addictions can be

dark. And they think they can be interesting but they are rarely

boring! And how accessible they are. Like Will Self, you think is the

writer writing this war the public or themselves? And then at the

books set in Tuscany. Where they are all going to have affairs with

each other. But it got me and it got you, didn't it? Yes. It got me.

In many ways, you think of a neural -- a Muriel Spark novel. The most

famous one... It is very Cubist. What?! Yes, and she is very like

that, Deborah Levy. With Swimming Home. She leaps from one sentence

very quickly. I thought it was contrived. I loved it but it is

almost the opposite of the Will Self. It does something a Paris

very simple. But it is also surprising because she nearly

didn't get it published. Extraordinary! I think in a moment

we are about to see the chairman of the Times's supplement, who will

tell us not only who has won but a bit of an outline of how they came

to their decision. Other people will praise the winner of the Man

Booker Prize are for 2012 and quite soon, too. Not long to wait now.

Others here will do that praising as soon as I have announced the

name of the book. The name that will stand for idea at their head

of a long line of great winners. Wolf Hall, 2009, Disgrace, 1999,

Midnight's Children, 1989. These books, these winners are part of

our lives. Like great cities and seaside towns. We go back to them,

we read them in different ways and at different seasons. They bring

with them memories of joy and rage. They go in and out of fashion but

there are always there. They form a catalogue and unfashionable though

that may be, a cannon. That is what this prize rout his life has

brought to the novel. A list that a new name is about to join. So since

others will praise the winner, albeit some of you with gracious

disappointment, I am going to be raised other things. First, my

fellow judges. Not so much for themselves, though they have been

courageous colleagues with whom I would take on any tough journey

again. As for their methods, their knowledge, the sensibility and

powers of reasoning, the literary criticism of them all over the past

11 months. They are critical arguments. The arguments that built

towards judgment and did not begin with a yes or no, a verdict of five

stars or none. All of them have shown that patience the novel

demands and deserves. The methods through which a great novel may

emerge interview. Through every obstacle, every prejudice in the

reader, every resistance from the text. Next, at some point tonight,

when the excitement has calmed down, I would ask you to raise a glass to

the books whose names are not on the finalists. This has been an

extraordinary year for man Booker fiction. Each judge has his or home

favourites from those we left behind but all of us found many

texts that deepen our understanding of other minds. Those other ways of

seeing, that glory at the novel's core. So, prays to the publishers.

Most of all, breeze to the small publishers who, this year, brought

us great things. -- praise to the publishers. His prize was

established four decades ago with the call the judges should not seek

to recognise or create best sellers. -- this prize. Of the judges were

ever to do that, argued the hugger -- the Booker chairman, Sir Michael

Caine. His words were right then and there are right now. These are

turbulent times for all sellers and buyers of books. Many a glass of

hope, bravado more like, must have been raised this year in the small

publishing houses of High Wycombe, crowbar and Newcastle. And all the

sweeter are their wines now. Our short list is selling well. That is

good. But without publishers, big and small, who put beauty first,

there would have been nothing worth Finally, praise to the novel itself

in 2012. The quality of the text that is not dead as soon as it read.

The novel that will stand to be re- read in future decades. The best

books, like places and people, change over time. We change with

them. We changed each other. We pass on, we pass on the books.

Someone accused me last week of not seeking novels that they can read

on the beach. No, I merely wanted novels that they would not leave

behind on the beach. APPLAUSE.

The novel's represented here tonight have no common theme.

Occasionally I fought against one, the City, perhaps. Mad money, that

technology, even parakeets. Immigrant parrots seemed the

novelist third of the year for a while but always the theme, like

the Byrds, flitted away. The novels that have won through to reach a

final deliberations today were reunited only by the energy of

language, by prose that glowed. The wings of words, the lilt, the

lightness and dark that renew our language as great novels always

have and must. That is not the only virtue of a novel, but it was the

virtue that linked our final list. It is a virtue always much needed

and especially needed now. So, for vitality, for fierce intelligence,

and most of all for prose. The winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize

for fiction is Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel.

Apology for the loss of subtitles for 49 seconds

Well, I don't know! You wait 20 years for rape Booker Prize -- for

the Booker Prize, and to come along at once! A broadcaster whose

opinion I really respect came to see me the other week. She has read

every shortlist for years. She said that this was one of the most

varied and the strongest she could ever remember. So I know how

privileged and how lucky I am to be standing here tonight. I would like

to thank the judges whose task in any year is a difficult and

delicate one and even also this year, I would think. I would like

to thank the organisation for their generous sponsorship and these

words are conventional, but they do come from the heart. I would like

to thank my publisher and my agent. And they have to do something very

difficult now. I have to go away and write the third part of the

trilogy. I assure you I have their expectations that I will be

standing here again! But I regard this as an act of faith and a vote

of confidence. Thank you. APPLAUSE.

The first woman to win the prize twice and the first British person

to win the prize twice. I am joined again by Ben Okri and Gaby Wood.

Are you suprised? I am delighted! I think the other

thing is that she has won it for two books in a series which has got

to be a first altogether. Judges are very wary of giving because two

sequels. They have to put the first run out of their mind. One of the

things that has struck me is that I preferred this to the last one.

did as well. It is much faster and streamlined and it has this very

novel technique in the end of whittling down the days and hours

and minutes until the final scene. It is very strong. I think this is

a case where the judges went for purity and strength of story

telling. I tend to have a theory about the Man Booker Prize in that

it tends to say something about the times we are in. What does this

tell us? I don't know. Here is a suggestion. The one thing that

really struck me was how vicious the politics were. Literally. They

were bloodthirsty and cut throat. I began to wonder if there is a

parrot -- pattern set 500 years ago. They could be using the elections.

It is extraordinary to win twice. To win once is amazing but to win

twice... This is the third time in the whole history of the prize.

Normally there is a great period of time between winning the first time

and the second time but in this case it was just three years.

years, yes. It is an extraordinary compliment to have. As she just

said, she has to now right the third instalment in the series.

pressure! A few things I will pick up with you. One thing that struck

me is that there were two first- time novelists here and of the six

books on the shortlist, some of them were novelists we had not

heard of but also from publishers we have not heard of which is

interesting. Four that is the great in the price can do, is to draw

attention to that. Everyone is complaining about the death of the

publishing industry but it means that really exciting stuff is

happening if only you know where to look. In these difficult times it

may have made publishers a little bit wary or cautious and it is the

small publishing houses that can take risks. It sends a really

wonderful message to publishing. All sewn to have second thoughts

and judgments, the Deborah Levy book that was shortlisted but did

not win was rejected at the start and is now doing very well because

it is very readable and that is also an interesting story.

published by subscription almost. It is a very interesting story that.

Is based on a subscription model. To what the books was subsequently

to the shortlisting, published in a more commercial form by a small

publisher and a big one. Talking a bit about what this does for an

author who wins, what does it do for publishing in general? Here we

are, talking about books on television which does not happen

all the time. That is something. Yes, it is really encouraging. I

was at a Book Fair last week and I was so cheered by the fact that

people are so invested in storytelling. How we get steered,

the vehicle, is unimportant. It does not matter if it is digital or

if it it's becoming a movie but the story that generates all of this.

It is interesting what it does for the quality of reading. The highest

quality of reading is all the help and encouragement they can get.

Partly because we are going through a period of diminishing potential.

I felt it was very courageous for someone like Will Self to write a

book like Umbrella at a time like this. You have to pay attention but

it is worth it in the end. Do you think that overall the terrible

times in the economy are encouraging be able to sit at home

and read books? It is a lovely idea. Perhaps it is just a pipe dream. We

will leave it there. It has been a great night. We have Hilary Mantel,