Tonight:
5°c
Can’t talk – I’ve got 80 books to judge
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent7 Apr 2009
Judging a books prize is like the biggest essay crisis you have ever had. For the past three months I have spent every spare waking hour with my nose in a novel, trying to choose between 80 competing for the £10,000 Orange Award for New Writers. The winner will be announced at the same ceremony as the main Orange Prize in June.
It meant reading details of sex with dildos on the Central line at 8.30am and cramming half-a-dozen tales of Venetian intrigue and Asian families into weekends.
My boyfriend joked we didn't talk any more. And on Saturday I woke up unable to recall what one did on an ordinary day off, a peculiar out-of-body sensation caused by having no book I had to reach for.
The worry is what public reaction will be to the shortlist announced today after a keenly argued lunch with fellow judges BBC World News presenter Mishal Husain and Diana Evans, the author who won the first new writers prize back in 2005.
Heaven only knows how we will choose just one victor come the summer. We agreed the standard was - largely - astonishingly high. I threw only one across the room before the end of its opening page.
Like its more famous older sister, the award is limited to women, which causes occasional apoplexy among the chatterati.
But no prize that has championed as many good reads as the Orange need be defensive. The Booker excludes Americans but I haven't heard many blokes from the British Commonwealth begging for a rule change there.
So I merely recommend for your consideration An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay, Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun and The Personal History of Rachel DuPree by Ann Weisgarber. Enjoy!
* And so to Cornwall for Easter with the dilemma as to whether to join the traffic jams on Thursday night or Friday morning. As the Somerset-raised scion of an extended Cornish clan, the perils of the M4/M5 at bank holidays are hardwired into my consciousness.
Part of me considers it utterly mad to be joining the masses on the journey westwards. But two close London friends have decamped to live in God's own county so what to do? It will be lovely once we get there ...
* The creative imagination is a gift to awe mere mortals. More evidence of it was on show when the National Theatre transferred War Horse, Michael Morpurgo's story of Joey the First World War cavalry mount, to the West End on Friday.
If anyone had told me that constructs of cane manipulated by all too visible men and women could seem like real horses I would scarcely have believed it.
But even on second viewing, these puppets - with a great, unstarry cast - reduced me, and not only me, to tears.
