Freed From Behind The Paywall: How I Became Addicted To Prizes

And The Cold Turkey (And Life Lessons) That Followed.

Photo by Nhia Moua on Unsplash

My first book, ‘The Scent of Dried Roses’ was published when I was 40 years old. I was amazed that I was getting a book published at all - being relatively old and from a philistine working-class background - and became even more amazed when the newspapers started to fill with interviews and positive reviews. 

But that was just the beginning.  I was nominated for prizes.  Lots of them.  The MIND Book of the Year.  The Esquire Book of the Year. The PEN Prize for Autobiography.  There may have been others that I have actually forgotten.

I can’t say that I didn’t love it.  I felt vindicated, excited, affirmed and delighted. When one of my heroes,  Alan Bennett,  presented me with the prize after I won the PEN award, I was on Cloud Nine.  I didn’t win the MIND Book of the Year, or the Esquire Non-Fiction Book of the Year, but there were glamorous ceremonies in which I was one of the centres of attraction.   

My ego, never insignificant,  began to inflate.

I wanted to write a novel next, but my publishers didn’t think non-fiction writers could be good novelists. So I decided to write a book about Tony Blair’s attempt to become Prime Minister in 1997.

Unfortunately, the New Labour administration wouldn’t let me within a million miles of Mr Blair, since I was a political ingenue and an unknown quantity.  My prizes didn’t help me at a Westminster bear pit. I had to abandon the book.

I offered my publishers a novel instead. I could almost hear their collective sigh of resignation. But they’d paid me an advance. What could they do?

The resulting novel, ‘White City Blue’ won the Whitbread First Novel Prize, and I competed against Seamus Heaney, Rose Tremain, JK Rowling and Jacqueline Wilson for Book of the Year in a live televised ceremony in which I felt like a literary star.  I didn’t win the prize, but I didn’t expect to.  It was one of the best nights of my life.

Nothing could stop me now.  My next novel, ‘Rumours of a Hurricane’ was shortlisted for the Whitbread Book of the Year, and the Encore Award.  It won neither.  It was meant to be a shoo-in for the Booker Longlist.  Nothing.  And it got a scathing review on the arts programme ‘Newsnight Review’.  Jonathan Miller on Radio Four called it ‘soap opera’.

My ego began to deflate - painfully.    In fact, I had a massive snit - absurd though it seems to me now.  No prizes! What the hell was going on? Why wasn’t my genius being universally acknowledged? It was an outrage.

I was so depressed by what I saw as the failure of my second novel - although of course now I can see that it was in so many ways a great success, even to be nominated for prizes in the first place, and receiving some incredible reviews -  that I could barely be bothered with the next one.   Why go to all that effort when no-one was going to give me PRIZES? So I dashed off my third novel, ‘The Love Secrets of Don Juan’ in three months ( ‘Rumours of a Hurricane’ had taken me a year and a half).

It wasn’t a very good book.  It was OK, and it got some decent reviews, but it was lazy. I was not surprised, or disappointed when it got no prizes.  In fact, I realise now, that was the point. I couldn’t be disappointed if I didn’t expect to win in the first place.

After that it was many years before I wrote another adult novel, instead concentrating on YA and screenwriting.

To cut a long story short, that was the end of the prizes for me.   After I found myself in (ludicrous) tears after not being shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year after writing my 2007 YA novel, ‘Fearless’ - ( which took me several years and which I poured my heart and soul into), I realised that I had become an addict.  A prize addict.

 As well as a prize numpty.

 The fact that ‘Fearless’ was longlisted for the Guardian Children’s Book Prize  might have kept the addiction going a little longer, but I felt reality closing in on me.

 I was no longer prizeworthy material.

Because I began to realise that temporality is partly the nature of prizes.  ‘The Scent of Dried Roses’ rose up on a tide of great memoirs that were being published in the 90s, from Blake Morrison’s ‘So When Did You Last See Your Father’,  Frank McCourt’s ‘Angela’s Ashes’,  Mary Karr’s ‘The Liars Club’ , and many, many more. Likewise, ‘White City Blue’ came to prominence at around the time of the emergence of so called ‘Lad Lit’ , with writers like Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons and John King charting the development of masculinity at a time when it was starting to come into dispute ( and disrepute).

In other words, without being aware of it, I was riding waves.  And now I was in a trough - one from which I have yet to emerge and almost certainly never will, since such waves don’t pitch up twice.

But now - well, it would be disingenuous to say that I don’t care.  More to say that I am realistic about prizes.  The conditions have to be right.  

My regret is more practical than emotional nowadays. Because as a writer, you are dependent on two things to maintain your career when you come to a slump.  And a slump can happen very easily because it is built into the structure of publishing.

How so? Because when you get a book that flops ( and boy oh boy, did ‘The Love Secrets of Don Juan’ flop - ironic when I considered it my attempt to sell out and write purely commercial fiction)  the warehouses look at those figures when your NEXT book comes out and order accordingly. 

So you find it harder and harder to get on the shelves or on  the front tables of bookshops .

And that is the beginning of the end, because now you are in a death spiral. Because the less books that are ordered, the less you can sell.

Anyway - as I say - there are two things that can get you out of that slump. One is a TV adaptation, and although nearly all my books were bought up by TV and Film companies, sometimes two or even three times ( making me a useful supplementary income)  none ever made it to the screen.

The second is, of course, prizes. And that’s why even though I have given up emotional attachment to prizes (and even my egoistic attachment)  I still recognise that they are one of the few ways you can rise, Lazarus like, from the publishing grave. 

But it’s not going to happen. Hey ho.  With my eleventh book, ‘ Now We Are Forgiven’ published later this year, I am still, at least being published. 

My hopes for the book ( which I consider - naturally - worthy of a whole plethora of prizes, starting with the Pullitzer obviously ) are roughly zero. 

And oddly enough, that is a far, far better state of mind to be in than when I was constantly gagging for the next laurel wreath to be placed on my head.  

My ego has shrunk. Thank god.   And as all the best stories teach, you only become a complete human being when pride takes a fall, and you learn, bitterly sometimes, the value of humility.

Now a simple compliment from a reader, or even better, a peer, is a profound consolation for the end of prizes - for it is a prize, perhaps the greatest prize.

That of the sincere admiration of someone who loves your work and to whom it has made a difference.