Prize and glory

Salman Rushdie c. Beowulf Sheehan

Ion Trewin in The Bookseller

18 June 2010

From a letter printed in The Bookseller 18 June 2010: 

"The trouble with making claims that one prize sells more books than another is that the Man Booker goes back further than Nielsen figures (leader, 11th June). Certainly Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (Booker Prize winner in 1981 and the Booker of Booker's winner in 2008) has sold more than a million copies. As for Schindler's Ark (1982) by Thomas Keneally this is the all time Booker Prize bestseller. I was Keneally's editor at Hodder & Stoughton and tracked the book's sales year after year. I can say hand on heart that it sold more than a million copies in Hodder/Coronet and Sceptre editions and then came along Steven Spielberg's film, "Schindler's List" in 1993. As a result of that Sceptre sold another million copies using the film's title.

However, let's be grateful that both prizes influence reading so spectacularly. May the Orange, which just celebrated its fifteenth birthday and the Man Booker, which is in its forty-second year, continue to pick winners that the reading public wish to read."

Ion Trewin
Literary director, Man Booker Prizes

 

The Man Booker Prize Fiction at its finest