How Do You Place a Winning Bet on the Booker Prize? Not by Reading the Novels

Predicting the winner of a committee-given literature award is a long shot, but English betting houses think they know the secret: Focus on the reviews, not the books.

Joe Pinsket - The AtlanticSept 10 2013

Last year's shortlisted authors. (AP / Lefteris Pitarakis)

Today, the shortlist of nominees for the annual Man Booker Prize was announced. Having shrunk today from 13 down to six, the field of potential recipients of England’s premier literary award will narrow down just once more—down to one—with a televised pronouncement of a single winner in October.

From this point, you could feasibly plan to read all six of the remaining nominated novels by the time the winner is announced (that is, if you read pretty quickly and ignore some of your daily responsibilities). But when the longlist of novels up for the Man Booker Prize was announced back in July, the list’s 13 titles comprised 5,118 pages’ worth of material.

That’s a hefty reading assignment that few outside of the judging committee would even think of taking on. (Even the judges themselves might not always read every work: As A. L. Kennedy, a Booker judge back in the ‘90s later put it to The Guardian, “I read the 300 novels and no other bastard did.”) But among those precious few power readers, perhaps surprisingly, is Graham Sharpe, the director of media relations for the English betting house William Hill.

Why? He wants people to gamble on who will win.

The slow-going, let-the-meaning-wash-over-you mentality that the Booker claims to emblematize seems at odds with the fast-talking, racetrack-influenced aesthetic of bookmaking. But betting on literary prizes persists in England, and the English media tends to frame the prize in terms of its odds

More