Proving that he is not a man to hold a grudge, John Fuller accepted a place on the panel of judges only a year after missing out on the prize as a nominee with Flying to Nowhere.

The son of the poet, Oxford professor and 1975 Booker Prize judge Roy Fuller, whose career path he has replicated, John Fuller is the author of some 20 volumes of poetry, as well as assorted novels, children’s fiction and essays. As a Booker Prize judge, he said that in ‘its economy and elegance,’ Anita Brookner’s winning Hotel du Lac was ‘a small triumph of moral insight worthy of the tradition of James and Forster’. In 1968, Fuller established the Sycamore Press, based in his garage, which published, among others, W. H. Auden, Peter Porter and Philip Larkin.

All nominated books

Flying to Nowhere