SMALL PRINT:THE OLD saying that there's never been a statue built in honour of a critic still holds true, but at least now one branch of newspaper critic – the book reviewer – has a prize he/she is eligible for. The Hatchet Job of the Year award has been inaugurated to reward "the acid in a literary community".
The prize will go to the most eloquent put-down of a literary effort. Already a clear front runner is critic Geoff Dyer for his pithy summary of Julian Barnes's Booker-Prize winning The Sense Of An Ending: "excellent in its averageness".
The Hatchet prize has been set up by The Omnivore, a website that aggregates arts reviews. “It is a crusade against dullness, deference and lazy thinking,” the organisers say. “It rewards critics who have the courage to overturn received opinion and who do so with style.” The eight-strong shortlist was announced earlier this week and includes David Sexton’s review of Carol-Ann Duffy’s
The Bees
(“very GCSE”), and Leo Robson on
Martin Amis: The Biography:
“full of repetition, contradictions and small, avoidable errors: Bradford seems to get things slightly wrong almost as a matter of principle. It is also full of spectacularly bad writing – about spectacularly good writing.”
Camilla Long's critique of the novel With the Kisses of His Mouthby Monique Roffey is attracting a lot of attention. She wrote the book is "480 pages of sub -Marie Claireovershare, a pointlessly explicit, infuriatingly naive and, at times, plain off-putting slither through a series of – wilfully? maliciously? – unedited sexual slurpings".
The winner will be the reviewer who, in the opinion of a judging panel drawn from the literary world, provided “the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review”. The award ceremony will take place on February 7th and the winner will receive a year’s supply of potted shrimp.
theomnivore.co.uk
