The Booker Prize-nominated books that were rejected by publishers

The Booker Prize is the ultimate accolade for English language fiction and winning it is a story of unalloyed success for any author and their book. Isn’t it?

In fact, what has become clear in recent years is that the path to winning the Booker Prize is often far from a smooth one, and a win can come at the end of a long and bumpy road of rejection and frustration.

The bumpiest of all might have been the road travelled by Douglas Stuart’s debut novel Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker Prize in 2020. Following its win, part of the story around the book was that it had been rejected more than 40 times before being accepted for publication.

Anna Stein and Lucy Luck, Douglas Stuart’s agents in the US and UK respectively, explain to me how it happened. Stein became Stuart’s agent after a friend of hers was ‘cornered’ by Stuart at a Christmas party, at which he told her: ‘I’ve written a novel.’ ‘She thought, “oh God, no,”’ laughs Stein, but then ‘she just took a peek at it and realised it was really something.’ She passed it to Stein, who ‘loved it – the emotional honesty on the page and the characterisations of the world.’

The reported figures for the number of rejections, they tell me, are correct: Shuggie Bain was rejected by 32 publishers in the US (‘I’m very certain, I checked,’ says Stein) and 12 in the UK. ‘A lot of people “don’t remember” passing on the book now,’ adds Luck. ‘But I have their emails!’ It was rejected, she says, ‘because it was too long, it was bleak; there was a general sort of admiration, but not love, which is a classic response’. 

Not everyone rejected it – Granta made a ‘very modest’ offer – but many just didn’t understand the appeal of the book. Stein took Stuart to meetings, including one with a leading American publisher. ‘It was excruciating. She brought the head of sales or marketing, and it was just tone deaf and awkward. It wasn’t a match!’

In fact, this second novel, which went on to become Seven Moons, did have some initial success: it was published in an earlier form in India in 2020, under the title Chats with the Dead – but this didn’t help when it came to selling it in the UK. David Godwin, Karunatilaka’s agent, tells me how the process worked. ‘We went straight to Jonathan Cape’ who had published Chinaman, he says. They turned it down. ‘To be fair,’ he adds, ‘every single person turned it down. Probably 25 people said no to the book.’ 

Why? Karunatilaka says, ‘I don’t revisit the rejection letters, because they’re always quite polite and you have to read the subtext. But I gathered it was just seen as a difficult book: “We don’t know how to sell this to a Western reader”.’ Godwin adds other explanations. ‘Publishing has become much more uniform. Ten years ago, Indian books and Asia were much more fashionable than they are now. Fashion is a very important part of publishing.’

The only publisher who expressed an interest in Karunatilaka’s novel was a tiny independent, Sort Of Books, run by husband and wife team Natania Jansz and Mark Ellingham. ‘Nat knew Shehan because she comes from Sri Lanka,’ says Godwin, and she saw the potential in the book. So ‘she picked it up, and made him rewrite it. Which I think he found very, very difficult and very stressful. She kept on at him to make it more accessible.’

Karunatilaka, at least now, is more sanguine about the process. Rejection is ‘quite demoralising’, he admits, ‘so when someone comes in and says “Yes, but it needs some work,” you’re willing to do it.’ And for this book, a small publisher was the right choice. ‘If one of the big houses had bought it in that form,’ Karunatilaka asks, ‘would they have spent two or three years revising it, with their publishing schedules and lots of other books coming out? Would they have submitted it for the Booker Prize? Probably not.’

This point – the attention a small publisher can give a book that a large house may not be able to – came up repeatedly in my conversations with authors and agents. With larger publishers, of course, the advances to authors can be higher, but, says Godwin, ‘the money is never a problem. I can solve those problems. It’s actually finding someone who believes in the books. Sometimes you have lots of money but no enthusiasm.’

Perhaps the reason Canongate could make a success of Life of Pi was to do with how publishing was changing. Larger publishers were finding, as Ravi Mirchandani knew from Shuggie Bain, that they could not publish based on an editor’s enthusiasm alone. Before he became an agent in 1995, David Godwin had been an editor at Jonathan Cape. ‘And I decided what we published. It was just me. And then they changed the meetings so that everyone was involved: publicity, marketing, sales. At that point, I said, “I’m not doing this any more,” and left.’

As well as Shehan Karunatilaka, Godwin also represents Lucy Ellmann, whose novel Ducks, Newburyport was one of the sensations of its year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019 against stiff competition. The book is an unusual read: one thousand pages long, a single sentence following the thoughts of an American woman (with occasional interventions from a mountain lion). Godwin acknowledges that ‘as a publishing prospect, it’s crazy. It’s far too long. She doesn’t have much of an audience. There’s no story there.’

Ellmann’s novels before Ducks had been published by Bloomsbury, and like Martel’s and Karunatilaka’s earlier books, had enjoyed good reviews but modest sales. When she produced Ducks, Newburyport, Godwin sent it to Bloomsbury as her long-time publisher. ‘They were absolutely horrified,’ says Godwin. Bloomsbury’s fiction division was run by Alexandra Pringle, who had published Ellmann for her whole career and had championed her work from the beginning. But, says Godwin, ‘she couldn’t believe it when I sent it to her. She didn’t get it at all.’ 

Alexandra Pringle, who retired from Bloomsbury last year, tells the story differently. ‘I thought it was an extraordinary piece of work,’ she tells me of Ducks. ‘I thought it was mystifying in lots of ways. I thought it was difficult. But I admired it enormously.’ But, she says, ‘I knew I couldn’t publish it, it wouldn’t be right for her.’ The reason is because, as noted by Mirchandani and Godwin, ‘life in publishing had changed. Years ago I would have just published willy-nilly. But it’s not possible to do that now, because you can’t do right by an author if you don’t have enough people in other departments gunning for the book.’ By this time Bloomsbury had grown into ‘a much bigger, more corporate environment than the one I joined 20 years before’.

And so, Pringle continues, ‘I had to say, “Lucy, we can’t do it. Because no one knows what to do with it. It completely mystified everyone.”’ Making this call to Ellmann was ‘agony’ for Pringle. ‘We had grown up together, we had done everything together.’ Pringle had commissioned Ellmann’s first novel Sweet Desserts. ‘It was the first novel I ever published, so it was my debut as well as hers,’ and Ellmann followed Pringle as she moved from publisher to publisher, so their careers ran in parallel.

Is there any truth in this? Does it explain why so many Booker winners and shortlisted books – often representing new types of fiction – have struggled to find mainstream publishers? ‘Herd mentality,’ says Ravi Mirchandani, ‘is not an inappropriate term. It does not operate all the time, though it does operate some of the time. But it would be ludicrous if we didn’t have some respect for the opinions of our competitors.’

Publishers are businesses, after all, and large ones need big hits in a way that small ones don’t; a replica of last year’s big hit is a surer bet than something entirely new and unexpected. Anna Stein and Lucy Luck understand that it’s different for agents and publishers. ‘We don’t have to publish the book, we don’t have to have a vision for it, we don’t have to find an audience for it,’ says Stein.

Of course, this isn’t a phenomenon unique to the Booker Prize, or to modern times. Even in the days when editors were all-powerful, many now-celebrated books struggled to find that green light. Audrey Niffenegger couldn’t even get an agent to represent The Time Traveller’s Wife, and after 25 rejections, found a publisher herself. Stephen King’s debut Carrie had a stuttering start, with 30 rejections, and Booker-winner Marlon James destroyed the typescript of his debut novel John Crow’s Devil after 78 rejections. (Luckily, he found it again in an email.)

Mirchandani regrets the influence that sales of an author’s previous books will have on acquisition decisions. Prize judges, by comparison, have much more freedom when it comes to making decisions; a writer’s previous books are of no importance.

‘I’m not sure all the information we have is a good thing. Prize judges don’t take Nielsen [BookScan, the industry standard for recording book sales] into account. The fact that the author has written four commercially unsuccessful books is irrelevant.’ 

Of course, there is no shame in an editor turning down a book if that rejection is for the right reasons. Mirchandani admits he has turned down books he really didn’t like that went on to great success. ‘I have no regrets about turning down Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. I didn’t like it. I wanted to throw the manuscript across the room.’ But its subsequent success is surely partly down to the fact that it was then published by an editor who did believe in it.

‘The word I hate the most,’ says Pringle, ‘is “comp”. “What’s the comp?” you’re asked in meetings, as in “What is the comparative title?”’ For books with no obvious ‘comp’ – like Shuggie Bain, or The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, or Ducks, Newburyport – the road to publication will continue to be uphill. And yet, once successful, these books then become a model – or ‘comp’ – for future acquisitions. 

The same irony applies when a Booker Prize winner has been adapted for the screen. Douglas Stuart is currently adapting Shuggie Bain into a BBC TV series, and Ang Lee’s 2012 film version of Life of Pi became a box-office smash and won four Academy Awards. As a result both novels, rejected for their lack of commercial potential, have become more commercially successful than most publishers could ever dream of.

And so great, unclassifiable, unfashionable novels will continue to be published – by someone – and will continue to be rewarded by prizes like the Booker, no matter how hard they fought to see the light of day in the first place.