‘‘IN 1986, I WON THE BOOKER PRIZE for Fiction with my novel The Old Devils. With that substantial exception, I found the occasion of the award a horrid one.” Kingsley Amis described winning the literary world’s most prestigious award in his Memoirs with customary wit and economy.
His by-then substantial frame was squeezed into a tight dinner jacket, with his feet in brown brogues because they would no longer fit into his smart patent leather half-boots. The food at the ceremony was “worse than is inevitable”, and the atmosphere tense. As he noted, “I realised I was becoming as much bothered by the prospect of making a fool of myself in public as of not winning.”
Amis had already been nominated twice before (for Jake’s Thing and Ending Up) but was attending the ceremony as the acknowledged frontrunner, with competition including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and Timothy Mo’s An Insular Possession. The chair of the judges was Anthony Thwaite (“another old chum of mine, of which you may make what you will”) and the otherwise all-female judging panel included the novelists Bernice Rubens and Isabel Quigly, the radio critic Gillian Reynolds and the “general reader” Edna Healey, wife of Denis.
While they might have been expected to side with Atwood, there had been two previous female winners, Anita Brookner and Keri Hulme, and it was also
