TOUCHDOWN - GREAT HOOK FOR THE BOOK

This week's perspective from Olri Giroux Namian:

The organizers of the Man Booker Prize, one of the literary world’s most prestigious annual awards for contemporary fiction, decided this year to undo a 40 year old oversight and in so doing, managed to create international PR buzz. The Booker, created in 1969, began as an award for books published the previous year but in 1971, the criteria were changed to recognize same year fiction. As a result, novels published in 1970 were orphaned. Forty years later, when Booker Foundation honorary archivist Peter Straus realized that 1970 “fell though the cracks”, an opportunity presented itself to knock the dust off those old dustjackets and reinsert that year’s best books into the prestigious literary competition. The Booker team moved ahead with a few non costly PR tactics that have drawn attention from around the globe this week. They announced the “Lost Booker” at an Oxford literary event, put out a short press release, gathered judges born in and around 1970 to shortlist novels and are opening up the final selection to the public through a website vote. Judging by the hype already created, one can only imagine this will translate into a career revival for some octogenarians and pad the pockets of publishers with a whole new list of bestselling books forty years after the fact. Touchdown to the Booker team for running with an imaginative idea and turning it into a textbook case in great PR.