Kingsley Amis’ deliciously malicious tale tackles twin irritations: the inevitability of growing old, and living in a world inhabited by others
The Booker Prize 1974
The Booker Prize 1974
The Booker Prize’s bugbear – the double win – raised its head for the first time when the award was split between Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton’s Holiday.
Nevertheless, the twin win at least put paid to the embarrassment that had greeted the shortlist announcement. Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up made the cut; all well and good except that his wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, was one of the judges.
She waved away the whiff of nepotism by declaring that, regardless, it was ‘easily Kinsgley’s best book’. Gordimer meanwhile went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991 while Middleton wrote 31 more novels – and turned down an OBE.
The Conservationist
Winner of The Booker Prize 1974
- Published by
- Jonathan Cape
Nadine Gordimer paints a complex portrait of dangerously deluded and wilfully ignorant privilege, set in South Africa during the time of Apartheid
Holiday
Winner of The Booker Prize 1974
- Published by
- Hutchinson
Stanley Middleton’s prize-winning novel is both a precisely observed portrait of English provincial life and a moving exploration of grief and regret
The shortlist
Surprises abound in Beryl Bainbridge’s unsettling comic novel, praised by fellow author Graham Greene as both ‘outrageously funny and horrifying’
Nadine Gordimer paints a complex portrait of dangerously deluded and wilfully ignorant privilege, set in South Africa during the time of Apartheid
Stanley Middleton’s prize-winning novel is both a precisely observed portrait of English provincial life and a moving exploration of grief and regret
Writing from personal experience - he was a long-standing member of the House of Lords - C.P. Snow probes the dynamics of British privilege and power
By C.P. Snow
