Diary – 18 October 2003

The Man Booker Prize dinner was held on Tuesday in the Egyptian room of the British Museum. It’s something of an ordeal for the six on the shortlist who have to wait until the pudding to hear who’s won. I’d only read one of the books, but they send you a disc of readings from them all, so that when I was asked — several times — who I thought might win I was able confidently to announce that it would be a toss-up between Monica Ali and Margaret Atwood. There was one particular extract, read beautifully by Martin Jarvis, which contained a lot of F-words, which I thought was a cheat. In the course of several interviews outside the museum I said Vernon God Little by a young chap called D.B.C. Pierre couldn’t possibly win. Of course, it did. Afterwards somebody told me that the author had said in some newspaper that he was sorry for a misspent youth and that his initials meant ‘Dirty But Clean’, or something like that.