David Holloway
(1970 Chair)
- Prizes judged
David Holloway was one of three former chairs of judges (alongside Malcolm Bradbury and W.L. Webb) who in 1993 were asked to choose the ‘Booker of Bookers’. The trio plumped for Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
Holloway’s long career in newspapers was spent almost entirely as a literary journalist. At the time of the 1970 prize he was chairman of the Society of Bookmen and literary editor of the Daily Telegraph. While at that paper he produced a series of books culled from the archives that chronicled individual decades. They showed something of the range and historical sensibility of a self-effacing man who thought hard before venturing criticism rather than writing for effect.
As well as being on the judging panel for the second-ever Booker Prize in 1970, Holloway was also a judge for the one-off Booker of Bookers prize.