Prizes

      Judging

Since 2009 I've judged
  • the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (won by Philippe Claudel and John Cullen for Brodeck's Report);
  • the Booktrust Teenage Prize (won by Neil Gaiman for The Graveyard Book);
  • the IMPAC Dublin Award (won by Jim Crace for Harvest);
  • the Marsh Award (won by Margaret Jull Costa for Bernardo Atxaga's The Adventures of Shola); and
  • the Man Booker International Prize (won by David Grossman and Jessica Cohen for A Horse Walks into a Bar);
...among others. And I have annually since 2011 been on the longlisting panel for the UKLA Book Awards (judged by teachers).

In early 2017, I recorded a 15-minute talk for BBC Radio 4's "Four Thought" programme on the experience of judging the MBIP and our effort to define what we mean by "A Good Book".

      Winning
     (& not Quite Winning)

Since 2004 I've won
  • the Blue Peter Book Award (The Ultimate Book Guide);
  • the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (The Book of Chameleons);
  • the LBF International Excellence Award (Mexico Market Focus);
  • the International Dublin Literary Award (A General Theory of Oblivion);

and been shortlisted for
  • the Man Booker International Prize (A General Theory of Oblivion);
  • the L.A. Times Book Awards (The Head of the Saint);
...among others

      Other

I've been involved in a number of other book prizes in different capacities, whether providing judges' training and producing shortlist resources (the Carnegie Medal), or setting up and funding my own translation prize (the TA First Translation Prize, from 2018 - read my Guardian piece about that one here). I have a long essay on literary prizes in World Authorship, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.