✒This week the £40,000 David Cohen prize for a lifetime's achievement in English literature – the closest thing British letters has to a Nobel – was awarded to Hilary Mantel. Yes, I'm afraid so: her again. But I think I speak for all my fellow David Cohen judges in saying: we're not sorry.
The questions were asked and (relatively) easily answered. Was it wrong to heap yet another prize on Mantel when she's had so many already? Well, no. The brief is to look at the work, and the work alone. Was it too soon to give a lifetime achievement award – which can't but feel retrospective – to a novelist far from old, and with the third part of a trilogy to deliver? Again: the brief is to consider a substantial body of work, not reward the writer least likely to produce anything else or most likely to croak before the 2015 David Cohen.
The brief, it should be admitted, is slightly insane in any case. After an initial top-of-heads shout-round to establish a longlist – playwrights, biographers, historians, poets, essayists, novelists or critics – we had 20 bodies of work to come to a view on: cartloads of apples to compare with cartloads of oranges. But such apples and such oranges!
I'm not able to write about our longlist, which remains confidential (though an enterprising gossip columnist might get some way to reconstructing it from a trip to my local Marie Curie shop). But be it said that, after a mild procedural controversy in the final judging meeting led to a second round of voting, Mantel – ahead by a hair – actually gained votes.
One of the special virtues of this prize is that it's for a body of work. So if Man Booker (and Costa, and Costa again, and Man Booker again, and the rest) gave Mantel's historical fiction a wider public, here was an opportunity to look at her career in the round. Many people now think of Mantel as a historical novelist, which she is. But she isn't only or even mainly that.
She's the astringent comic fantasist of Fludd and Beyond Black. She's the beady and accomplished memoirist of Giving Up the Ghost. She's the author of the precision-tooled short stories in Learning to Talk. She's a fierce and subtle essayist. She can do more or less everything we ask of prose. To use the technical vocabulary of literary criticism … damn, she got game. This was a chance to say so. And, as I say, we're not sorry.
