Turn off the charm ... get rid of your piffling similes ... eat meat, drink blood – Hilary Mantel's advice on writing

When Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel was announced as the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize last night, it wasn’t exactly a surprise for those of us who had been watching developments in anticipation. She was the favourite in betting circles with odds of 10/11 and fellow contender A.S. Byatt saw her as enough of a threat to denounce her novel to the media. That’s all well and good, but, I wonder, how exactly does one go about incurring Byatt’s wrath and winning the Booker?

Noting that the decision was not a unanimous one, chairperson of the judging panel, James Naughtie, attributed the ultimate outcome to “the sheer bigness of the book: the boldness of its narrative, its scene setting”. Sensing that my quest would not be satisfied by a less-than-empirical description like “sheer bigness”, he elaborated that the novel counts as “an extraordinary piece of story-telling”. Criteria one and two: scope and narrative skill.

Last year’s winner of the Booker Prize was more of a surprise. First-time novelist Aravind Adiga and The White Tiger beat out favourite Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture by a narrow margin. According to Michael Portillo, the chairperson of that judging panel, “What set it apart was its originality. The feeling was that this was new territory.” This reminds me of something I read in an interview with judge Lucasta Miller, who prioritised writers with “a strong individual voice”. Criteria three and four: originality and individuality.

Having unearthed these four criteria, I turn to the website for guidance. The competition’s slogan is that it “promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year”. “Finest” and “best” are not exactly empirical measures, although they suggest that successful novelists have a literary, rather popular, bent. Criterion five: literary value.

Looking at the winners of the prestigious award over the last 40 years (most of which I confess I find difficult to digest and more putdownable than un-), I contemplate what rewardable literary merit, with its five prongs, looks like. There is only one exception to the rule, as far as I can see, and that would be Yan Martel’s The Life of Pi, which, although original, doesn’t rank high in any of the other values. I wonder how the Possession author feels about this interloper? If the answer is wrathful, could I count it as criterion six?

By Camilla Lloyd