Picture this: it’s Booker longlist time, the Booker Prize Foundation’s in-house team has spent seven or eight months with this year’s judges, and while the panel gets ready to hunker down again and choose their shortlist, the rest of us have an eye on next year. Who should the next set of judges be? We’re often asked how we choose our judges and what qualifications we look for in them. So here’s a small glimpse behind the scenes. 

First of all, it’s important to know that suggestions for judges come from lots of different places – our own team, who have a range of interests; our advisory committee; past judges, who know what’s involved; friends in the book world and beyond it. We pay attention to who’s reading and writing and thinking about words in the cultural world at large. We try to avoid a situation in which judges are chosen on the whim of, say, the Chief Executive… You never know what you’re not seeing until someone else points it out.  Secondly, we never think about judges individually – the goal is always the group. (More on what the effect of the group should be in a moment.) 

Often what we end up putting together is a jury of creative peers: people who exercise their imaginations on a regular basis, or are used to working alongside others who do. It’s crucial that judges should be well-disposed towards the writers whose books are submitted, and receptive to the risks good writers are taking. It can be helpful if judges know what it feels like to take that leap, as well as remembering that they’re reading on behalf of the general public.   

Early Booker Prize panels often included critics, academics and, of course, novelists. Saul Bellow was a judge, and so were John Fowles, Philip Larkin, Angela Carter, Edna O’Brien, Penelope Fitzgerald, Beryl Bainbridge, P.D. James and Hilary Mantel.  

But the Booker Prize wouldn’t have the global impact it has if it were judged in a literary echo chamber. In the middle years there was a preponderance of politicians: Kenneth Baker, Michael Portillo, Douglas Hurd, Chris Mullin and Chris Smith, to name a few. I – at the time a newspaper literary editor – was a judge in 2011, as part of a panel led by the former head of MI5, Stella Rimington. (It was a much-maligned but very happy group.) 

It’s reasonable to appoint a politician as chair: their day job, after all, is to arrive at consensus. But I hesitate over the implication that there is a creative class, and that somewhere higher up in the establishment pecking order, there’s another class that’s fit to judge them.   

So in my time at the Booker (from 2016), I’ve sought to return to the idea of peers. With one proviso: that the notion of what constitutes a Booker novelist’s peer be expanded.    

As a result, we’ve had artists and graphic novelists on the panels for the first time (William Kentridge, Leanne Shapton, Edmund de Waal, the late Tom Phillips). We’ve had musicians, composers and filmmakers (Joanna MacGregor, Beth Orton, Nitin Sawhney and Caleb Femi). 

We’ve continued to have critics (Leo Robson, Sameer Rahim, Chris Power) and past Booker novelists – Abdulrazak Gurnah was a judge before he won the Nobel Prize, Sarah Hall, Chigozie Obioma and Esi Edugyan have been judges and Roddy Doyle became the first past winner to chair a panel. But we’ve also had a speculative fiction writer (M. John Harrison), and we’ve had a judge on the English language prize who had been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and writes in French (Alain Mabanckou).  

It’s always interesting to hear actors talk about their reading, because they grapple with words in a different way from non-performers – Olivia Williams, Natascha McElhone, Adjoa Andoh and Sarah Jessica Parker have all made astute and heartfelt contributions to discussions. Poets tend to read at the level of the sentence – I’m thinking of David Harsent, Lemn Sissay, Natalie Diaz, Helen Mort and Mary Jean Chan as well as Caleb Femi – and historians see the sweep (Amanda Foreman, Helen Castor, Maya Jasanoff, Neil MacGregor).  

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was a wise and humble panellist, as was Baroness Lola Young, the cross-bench peer. Very occasionally, a legendary retired publisher will join the panel: Margaret Busby, Britain’s first Black female publisher, for instance, or Liz Calder, one of the founders of Bloomsbury, or Max Porter, who in addition to being a Booker-longlisted author himself had edited two Booker-winning books (The Luminaries and The Vegetarian). When we’ve had crime writers – Val McDermid and Lee Child were both superb judges – they’ve been in conversation with philosophers (Anthony Appiah) or classicists (Emily Wilson).  

In other words – and this is perhaps the most important factor – it’s the group dynamic that matters, not just the individuals. You want some who respond to the heart in a book and others who are drawn to the head in it. They all need to be committed listeners. It’s often assumed that newspaper columnists or TV pundits would make natural prize judges, and they sometimes do. But already knowing what you think is not necessarily an asset in this context. This is a panel discussion that lasts the best part of a year, during which judges live their lives and come together repeatedly, regardless of what’s going on outside the room. When they meet once a month they discuss 20 or 30 books, and in each case, every judge will have read a slightly different book from the one the other four have read. Their task as readers is to describe the books and see if their fellow judges recognise their own experience in the description. They often change each other’s minds. Gradually the best books become richer, through the discussion. 

It’s important to create a trusting environment in which the judges can do this. To state the obvious – and there is perhaps an emotional distinction to be made here between fiction and non-fiction – reading novels is a very personal experience, and judges often share something of themselves in the process of evoking that. One person’s irritant may be another’s consolation; hearing this matters, because those experiences are likely to be replicated in the world at large – among the readers to whom they are recommending, or not recommending, these books. Once the judges have earned each other’s trust, many stay in touch. One panel has even continued as a book group. 

A judging panel needs to face in two directions: inwards, towards their colleagues in the judging room, and outwards, to the world. They must be equipped to make the best possible set of collective decisions, and they must also signal to the general public that they can credibly read on their behalf. Who are these people? Why should I trust them to make decisions for me? These are questions readers are entitled to ask. Equally, authors might think: who is this person to cast judgment on my work? The judges must have enough expertise and a wide enough span of tastes that every good book stands a chance of finding its ideal reader on the panel. And they must also have enough variety in their backgrounds that readers feel, broadly speaking, represented.  

Eventually, they must agree: this final piece of the puzzle is based not on intellect or experience but on human qualities that include generosity of spirit and openness of mind.  

Attempting or anticipating these combinations can be a bit of a high-wire act. Most years a group emerges that is far more surprising, more enlightening and more productive than the sum of its parts. Spending time in the company of these temporary families is, I often feel, a lot more fun than any job deserves to be. And I can see the effect of that in the books they choose. Booker judges have immersed themselves in the longlisted novels with each other’s perspectives in mind, so their recommendations are acts of generosity. They anticipate the many readers, in the world and over time, who will eventually join the discussion.