Literary Prize Quotes

I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.

I approached writing a story for the CBC Literary Awards as a mercenary venture - $5,000 for one story, not bad. Now, how do you win it? Jurors are wading through skyscrapers of paper, looking for one story that stands out.

I'm hugely honored [with the Man Booker Prize].

I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.

I'm sure I wouldn't have been asked to judge the Man Booker if it weren't for 'Downton.'

I was extraordinarily lucky. I wrote a book because I wanted to see if I could write a mystery. Someone nagged me into sending it to a contest, which it won, after which I was offered a two-book contract, thus requiring the writing of a second book.

'Ancillary Sword' picked up the Locus and the BSFA, which surprised the heck out of me.

You can't really win as a Booker judge. If you choose the obvious names, the unit-shifters, you're accused of being timid and unimaginative; if you choose the unfamous, you're labelled willful and perverse.

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

There can be no better prize for a writer than one awarded by an international book fair.

I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.

Every year, the Giller jury is different. You write the best book you can and throw it out there.

In Australia, the Man Booker is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle.

I can't say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it.

I am, of course, greatly honoured to win the Booker, which is one of the great literary prizes in the world.

One of my books, 'Rain Falling on My Face,' earned me the 39th Edogawa Ranpo prize. It's a very prestigious literary prize in Japan, mostly for mysteries and thrillers.

The running joke about the Premio Cervantes, the most coveted literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, which was established by Spain's Ministry of Culture in 1976, is that Cervantes himself wouldn't have received it. This is because he was, in his heart, the most anti-Spanish of Spanish writers.

The IMPAC is a terribly important award.

I was delighted when Booktrust asked me to be chair of judges for the Booktrust Teenage Prize 2010.

I don't think the computer will win the Booker, but no-one ever expected a computer to beat a chess grandmaster.

Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.

Being shortlisted for the Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize is, of course, a real honour for me and my work. When I wrote 'Conversations with Friends,' it was hard for me to imagine the book even finding readers - so it's a huge privilege to find it judged alongside such exciting and innovative new writing. I'm very grateful.

For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.

I would never have thought my collection of short stories would win the Giller.

I used my NEA fellowship to write my novel, 'In Country,' which was published by Harper & Row in 1985.