News today (Oct 19, 2011) that Julian Barnes has won the £50,000 Man Booker prize for The Sense of an Ending  must have shocked the prize selection committee. Why? The judges, as opposed to the committee, had vowed - for the first time - to include ‘readability’ in their criteria.

And Barnes is actually readable.

That was a superb snub to the literati who had traditionally recommended unreadable works that would be bought on trust (‘a Booker winner’) then flung, by disappointed reader...
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