Paul Bailey introduces Peter Smart, whose self-confessed failings gradually reveal a grotesque portrait gallery of the extraordinary people around him
By Paul Bailey
The Booker Prize 1977
The Booker Prize 1977
The chair of judges, Philip Larkin, threatened to jump out of a window if Paul Scott’s Staying On didn’t win. Luckily for literary history, Scott’s book triumphed and Larkin lived on.
Scott’s wartime experience in the army in India, and especially of British attitudes towards the locals, underlay Staying On, a companion novel to his Raj Quartet. The book is a moving and nuanced portrait of an English ex-pat marriage in a rapidly modernising India.
Scott’s win was nevertheless shot through with melancholy: he was unable to attend the prize ceremony because he was already suffering from the cancer that was to kill him six months later. He was just 57 when he died.
Staying On
Winner of The Booker Prize 1977
- By
- Paul Scott
- Published by
- Heinemann
Paul Scott’s sequel to The Raj Quartet is both an engrossing portrait of the end of an empire and an engaging dissection of a long-lasting marriage
The shortlist
Caroline Blackwood’s macabre and wickedly funny portrait of a monstrous, iron-willed dowager presiding over her long-suffering family
Jennifer Johnston’s moving, yet sparse and unsentimental, account of a sensitive young boy growing up during The Troubles in Northern Ireland
Through the life-changing experiences of 40-year-old Ann, Penelope Lively offers a subtle exploration of memory and identity, chance and consequence
Barbara Pym’s compassionate and funny novel about four people in late middle-age with different eccentricities but the same problem: loneliness
By Barbara Pym
Paul Scott’s sequel to The Raj Quartet is both an engrossing portrait of the end of an empire and an engaging dissection of a long-lasting marriage
By Paul Scott
The 1977 judges
Michael Caine presenting Paul Scott’s daughter Carol with the 1977 prize at the award ceremony, 23 Nov 1977 © Marc Henrie / Oxford Brookes Library
© Marc Henrie / Oxford Brookes Archive