Robert Webb, of Peep Show fame, told us being a Booker Prize judge this year was “really interesting and fun”, but not an endeavour to enter into lightly. At the prize’s shortlist party in the National Portrait Gallery last night, the TV writer and actor said reading became an “extreme kind of endurance” activity and he couldn’t finish all the books. Judges were tasked with reading 163 of them in seven months. “It works out as a novel a day, which is impossible,” Webb said. “You finish as many as you can and the other ones you put to one side after a respectable but undisclosed fraction has been read.”
Fellow judge, professor James Shapiro warned of the pressure such a prestigious award can bring. “Sometimes you win the Booker and it’s the last great book you write. It’s a terrible weight,” he told us. “I know of a former Booker winner who got crushed a bit by that pressure and it was a setback as much as it brought visibility.”
