I of. You're all too young to remember this, but a play was written which became a film called Educating Rita.
And it was about a young woman from a working class background in Liverpool,
and she had been a hairdresser and she decides to get herself an education,
and she joins the Open University, that great invention of the late sixties.
And and you see that she does this because she loves reading. She's a she's a book reader, and we know that 80 percent of novels are bought by women.
So bear that in mind when you go off to write your novel in the future that the reading public out there actually on novels is a female.
So she and she has a tutor as the open university works not like Oxford,
she has a tutor who is at the local university and who will see her from time to time.
He be the being the marker of her essays and so forth.
And at some stage, she's asked to write an essay on some work, some book that she's enjoyed being interested in and to critique it in an essay.
And so she goes in to hear what the tutors got to say.
And he says to Rita, Rita, when we ask you to get a novel that you have to critique, we weren't talking about John Grisham.
I actually wasn't John Grisham, but I can't remember who it was, but it was basically one of those airport novelists.
And that wasn't what was intended. And she says, well, what was intended.
And he said, Well, you know, a serious book. And she said, but it was very serious. That's death, mayhem, destruction, jury trial.
And he goes, No, it has to be a classic. It had to be, you know, it had to come from the canon.
And she says, What do you mean?
And he then explains to her, And I'm just telling you in the kind of I'm giving you a sort of shortened version of this.
But he basically says to her, You know, it has to be a serious book. It has to be a book that recognises me a classic.
And she says, who says what's good?
She asked, and it is, you know, it is the innocent question, but it's the real question.
And so when we can talk about merit, of course, down at the Oxford Press and and we don't decry it,
there will be people who decide what is meritorious. But as in all of those things, we know that merit is, is, you know, it's not a value free zone.
And and we have to think about whether what is good it is the right question always have in mind the reader question.
Now I've been on different panels looking at book prises.
One of the things we have to always remember about the classic is that was not confined to the novel.
We tend to think of it as the novel, but as in fact, Judas just said it can be all manner of writing and poetry, and it can be.
And so I've not just sat on a prise, don't only actually I haven't sat on the book, I'm on the book Booker Trust.
So I get to help choose the judges who get to read the books. But I don't have to read the one hundred and forty six books.
I get the last six, which is terrific. And then I do look at the ones that have shortlisted, but I have been on the jury panel for the orange prise.
I have been on the Samuel Johnson prise, which biography science that all non-fiction.
I was on the jury, but then 10 years later chaired that I have I've.
I've also been on the jury of the Avalon poetry prise.
I've been on The Guardian's first book, Prise, which is novels,
biographies and but so was the first time that someone who's written something so you know,
on the range of prises, I've covered quite a lot of the ground.
And all I can tell you is that every time you start on this process, you sit down and you ask yourself the question of What is it?
What criteria are you going to apply? And the thing is the things that tend to be that the list of criteria usually are about the things that in fact,
you know, you've heard about today, which is that people want. It has to be about rich.
It has to be about about somehow that that it's that it's.
Seeking in some way to reach beyond perhaps the banal something that in some ways,
in some way, I think we're talking about something that is transformative.
Because for a moment, for a while, I thought the great books that I loved in my life had been ones where I had felt that business,
that light switch going on and a recognition, but that in itself is not enough.
And I think that for me, there is a sort of transformative quality in the great novel or any book that I
think one keeps and feels that one goes back to and that lives with you afterwards.
And I remember that when Sandi Toksvig was the chair of the orange prise where I was on the panel,
that was one of the things that she felt very strongly about and I shared it with her was that that sense that when you finished it,
that that a week later, there were parts of it that somehow were living on with you, that it has a that it had a resonance that continued to be there.
And it wasn't a question of just closing it. If it was about simply books that are read or that will still be read many years later,
Agatha Christie would be right up there winning the stakes because of the English world over.
I was the chair of the British Council and we had libraries all over the world, 112 countries,
and I have to sadly tell you that the books that were all was taken out more than any others were Agatha Christie's,
and we had to sort of see as libraries were modernised, you know, should Agatha Christie be sitting there on the shelves?
And there were also great debates about all of that. So so there is that question about what what is it that makes things last?
And there are some things that will last, but it is not about great quality.
And so we have to ask ourselves the question about what it is that makes things lost.
The other thing that was interesting for me was that last year, when the Booker prise was being, the shortlist came out.
You'll remember there was a great debate because quite a number of crime writers were in there and it was felt that there was still a Remington,
the master spy woman. You know, she'd been the head of MI5.
And yeah, it was MI5, the head of and and she was the chair of the of the of the panel.
And it was noted that perhaps she had helped direct some of the the taste because there were some rather kind of whodunit.
She kind of the novel seemed to be the flavour of the panel.
And there is that question Can you be a really terrific writer?
Can you create a classic which is in fact of that, John?
Or is that just basically never going to be literature?
And I want us to have the opportunity of discussing this because the idea of a panel is that we that we are not lectured to,
but that you have an opportunity of coming in with your ideas of what is it that makes a great novel for me in my life.
The great novels, always, and it takes it back to the theme of your conference. They almost always have had some kind of political resonance with me.
Now that may be because I'm a particularly politically inclined sort of person.
I want to see themes. I want to understand the world better. And so, yes, it's about the human condition,
but I often the thing that stays tends to be almost about more than just the particular element of human experience.
It has to be in the context of something bigger. And that may be, of course, as a woman that I that many,
many of the writers of great women's female novels have also actually been reflecting on the time.
And even if it wasn't their own intention at the time, have actually described what was happening politically for women so that we even now can look
at people like Jane Austen and see it in a political reading to it in terms of feminism,
because we understand that, you know, women didn't inherit. We actually wasn't writing about property rights.
But in there and telling the story, you saw the impact of how property rights affected women's lives and the
choices that women made and how marriage was so important and and all of that.
So there are ways in which you yourself will find for you classics that will matter more.
I am, as would you would say, as a criminal lawyer,
it's not surprising that Dostoyevsky and Crime and Punishment is up there on my list that Kafka is there too,
because it's my experience in my daily round of the kind of cases that I do.
And, you know, so so of course you're going to we're going to have all of that if you're talking about great political work.
I've just been a judge on the Orwell prise, which just made its decisions a week or two ago.
And and that was about political writing.
And it covered novels but overcovered books which were writing about the state of our world in many different manifestations.
And what I always say to people when they when it comes to book pricing that if you get to the last round, if you get to be to be in the shortlist,
do not weep if you don't win because of it, because the chances once you get to that stage of the last five, it is a total lottery.
It really is. And everyone should feel just, you know, that they have.
They have won if they get to the last five, because after that, it's basically, you know, it's it's like a roll of the dice.
But for me, I mean, I was thinking it through when I was thinking of it in the last few years, the great things I've written a read, I wouldn't.
Back and read Mary Barton again, a book because it has has got a theme which is about a murder, but it's a certain it's about industrialisation,
and it's all about Elizabeth Gaskell, a flawed novel, but I still think a great novel and worth a revisit.
We recently at Mansfield College, I had Hisham Matar, the Libyan who's written a wonderful book called In the Country of Men,
which I think again I think will be a classic describing the horrors of living under
a dictatorship and how and about the the innocence of a child betraying a parent.
And it's it's a wonderful book, and I and if we are to talk about how things shift and change,
I do think that much of our literary world at the moment is being greatly enriched by the books being written by people who are sort of,
you know, not white, male and middle class or white, even female and middle class,
but being written by people from many different cultural experiences and and and really
opening and doors of the imagination to us and of experience to us that we're not there,
that are new and and which take us to places that we haven't been taken to before.
And so many of the writers that are most interesting to me at the moment are culturally from a background very different from my own.
But but but who take me into interesting places?
What I wanted to say to you was, we have to ask ourselves an interesting question in that this whole business of choices,
does it matter that we that we, for example, would it matter if we were the literature, the writing of people that we we really can't sympathise with?
I mean, for example, a great, you know, the reading World in America is busy absorbing the work of Anne Rand.
Do you know who and Rand is?
You know who's who's the sort of great believer in the kind of the market winds all look after number one, that that culture,
which has kind of swallowed up the whole of kind of the waste currently, which is the idea that the market wins out, you know?
Oh, you know, it's very interesting. I remember when I was young having arguments with people about evil and war.
Pretty nasty piece of work. Would you want to sit and have dinner with them? Certainly not, but you did write good novels.
And and so, you know, there is that business. I mean, can.
What is it? I mean, can we sort of. Can a novel ever take us to be on the side of the bad guys?
And this and for me, the great Norville almost always has a sort of generosity in it.
Perhaps that's one of the elements that I look for in a great novel that resonates with me that I want to go back to.
But it will be different from everybody. So I want revelation. I want transformation.
I want I want to have it live with me so that it becomes part of me.
I want it to remain on my shelves so that I can take it down and hand it to the people I love.
And I want it to be somehow. Not just describing the human condition.
But making me more human. Thank you.