Despite believing that ‘a committee is a blunt instrument of literary criticism’, the novelist David Lodge chaired a group of judges that came up with a roundly applauded winner
Lodge’s ‘campus novels’ satirising academic life were the fruit of a long parallel career as an academic, notably at the University of Birmingham – the model for his fictional institution ‘Rummidge’. With his friend Malcolm Bradbury he showed readers that non-metropolitan fiction was both vibrant and valid. Lodge was Chair of judges in 1989 (awarding the prize to Kazuo Ishiguro for The Remains of the Day). He was also a twice-shortlisted novelist (1984 and 1988), while his Out of the Shelter (1970) was longlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize. He was also the author of three plays and two volumes of autobiography. He died on 1 January 2025 at the age of 89.
