Bidisha

What attracted you to judging the Orange Prize for Fiction?
I’d wanted to be an Orange judge ever since the prize launched, so when I was invited to come on board this year I didn’t need any time to decide. What is there to flim-flam about? The prize promotes artistic excellence, it gets people reading and, most importantly for me as a feminist, it is an incredibly powerful assertion of  female unity, solidarity and celebration. Plus, in the guise of being a committed professional, you get to spend a few months voraciously reading a boxload of books that you were going to read anyway. The perfect assignment.


What’s the most enjoyable aspect of the judging process?
Eating our way through the delicious mammoth burgers, chunky chips and dense bricky brownies at the longlist and shortlist meetings. No, it was spending the quiet time at Christmas and the New Year sitting reading books and feeling a chill of appreciation upon completing one which might be a contender. Then getting together with the other judges and discussing its merits. Also, realising just how much great writing there is out there, and in a diversity of genres and approaches. A slightly depressing realisation was that many excellent books are published but, because of the sheer number of works brought out, fall by the wayside, are overlooked by critics and bookshops and simply don’t receive the coverage and appreciation they deserve.


The most challenging?
Some books which showed great promise but were not quite ‘there’ yet had to be left off the longlist because of space considerations. I kept wishing we could contact the authors in question to let them know just how much we appreciated and enjoyed the work and expected to see, in a few years, that major novel of theirs swoop up all the prizes in one go. In a practical sense it is hard to read one’s way through all the books – the key for me was not to speed-read but to read normally in all the time that would otherwise be spent watching bad TV, daydreaming, exercising, eating healthily or talking to other people.


How differently do you read when you’re judging than when you’re reading for pleasure?
My criteria for excellence are the same whether I’m reading for pleasure or for work, but the process is different. When judging I set aside two days to read a book and that is all I do in that time, reading at a normal pace. Reading for pleasure is completely different – I take the book on the Tube with me or read a few chapters before bed. Reading as a prize judge is intensive, disciplined and demanding – but doable and always rewarding. What redeems the process over and over again is finding that one intriguing book out of four or five standard ones. At the longlist stage in particular there was little ambiguity about which books were worth including and which weren’t quite up to par.


What was the impact of reading so many novels in such a short time?
My eyes hurt. That, in combination with the heavy tinnitus I’ve been cultivating through working in radio, means that I’ve lost two of my five senses for love of the arts. To be serious for a moment – not, I realise, that I was being particularly amusing before – it’s given me a deep appreciation of the sheer talent that’s out there, against the perennial arts-world moans that the novel is dead, etcetera. It’s got me back into the habit of reading continually and always keeping a book on the go, and taught me to search out those authors, by word of mouth or on book lovers’ blogs, whose names don’t always make it into the newspapers. I’d been erring towards non-fiction and blockbustery genre fiction but reading for the Orange Prize has completely restored my faith in what literary fiction of the most serious, attentive and committed kind is capable of. Having said that, I do now feel like going to a charity shop and reading the trashiest, nastiest, most dog-eared gold-embossed bonkbuster I can get my hands on.


Anything else you’d like to tell website visitors?
Keep reading! And instead of going for the Top Ten Bestselling Books as seen in the Sunday papers, browse, ask for recommendations and check out smaller publishers. My current favourite publishers are Telegram Books, Persephone Press and Portobello Books. Oh – and I can’t wait for A S Byatt’s latest novel The Children’s Book. The woman’s a genius.