The grueling process of picking a Booker Prize winner

British classicist Mary Beard has read and lectured about Homer and Virgil’s epics countless times. This year she embarked on an odyssey of her own: reading 163 works of fiction in six months to judge the Booker Prize.

“I’ve never worked as hard in my life. I mean, writing a book is easier than that. It was a revelation and a privilege,” said Beard, who is chairing the Booker Prize judges.

The panel of five judges whittled down 163 entries to a shortlist of six books.

British classicist Mary Beard is pictured at the British Museum in London on Sept. 2.

Photo: Reuters

The winner is to be announced in London on Monday, with six authors, including previous winners Douglas Stuart and Marlon James in the running. The person who wins the Booker crown would walk away with ￡50,000 (US$66,960) and see their careers transformed.

The grueling judging process behind one of the most coveted prizes in the literary calendar has been a source of intrigue and drama since it launched in 1969.

Around December last year, the judges began receiving cartons of about 30 books at a time to digest on a strict schedule, reading one a day or more. They are not allowed to divulge what books they are reading, working under a shroud of secrecy.

The judging routines, for the most part, were far from glamorous.

“You just end up taking a book with you wherever you go,” writer and critic Rebecca Liu said. Once, she ended up reading a few pages while waiting in a nightclub line.

Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker had to squeeze in his reading while on tour with his band, exchanging boxes of books for digital iPad versions.

“It is quite dull when you’re traveling,” Cocker said. The books “took me somewhere, it was like having somebody.”

Poet Raymond Antrobus said he would “cry” every night a month into the process, and the books began affecting his dreams.

“You’re trying to enter these people’s universes that they’ve created, but also their ambition, that’s a very human thing,” Antrobus said.

The Booker prize has over the years expanded its pool of judges beyond novelists and literary critics to include celebrities such as Cocker and actor Sarah Jessica Parker.

Over six months, each of the five judges reads every entry, so “every book gets five chances to be noticed,” Beard said.

They create a longlist of 13 books, known as the Booker Dozen, then re-read them for the shortlist and repeat the process to pick a winner. Then, during three-hour closed door meetings — this year hosted at London’s Fortnum & Mason luxury store — the judges hash it out.

“I was standing up a lot and tossing books across the room,” poet Patricia Lockwood said.

There were disagreements — Lockwood said at one point they tussled like “pigs in the mud” — but the judges found ways to reach consensus.

One system, the “traffic light” method, involved each judge classing a book as green, amber or red.

“The really interesting ones are where you get mixtures of red and green,” Beard said.

There is no fixed judging criteria, which has resulted in the prize being criticized as arbitrary in the past.

Judges this year settled on two questions: “Would you read it again?” and “would you recommend it?”

Ultimately, the judges found themselves looking for “distinctly human” books, Liu said, wary of the threat of artificial intelligence.

“I think we consciously towards the end wanted to make a human shortlist ... things that celebrated the flaws, that were strange and weird,” Liu said.