The Hatchet Job of the Year doesn't cut it | Alex Clark

This celebration of bookish snark, won by AA Gill for his Morrissey assault, is less daring and less worthy than it thinksIt's the middle of a wet, wet winter, unaccountably you haven't shed the pounds or learnt the cello as per the optimism of 1 Jan, and to make matters even worse, Valentine's Day is just around the corner. No wonder you're feeling bilious; thank God, therefore, that there is a literary prize to match your mood.Last night, the Omnivore's Hatchet Job of the Year award, an annual celebration of unkind book reviewing, went to AA Gill for his piece on Morrissey's Autobiography; on this scant information alone, if the prize were suddenly in need of a new name, we might reasonably suggest the Shooting Fish in a Barrel award. But more of AA presently; for now, let us leave him to enjoy his spoils, a year's supply of potted shrimp donated by The Fish Society (I think the idea is to draw a parallel between the smell of rotten fish and the smell of rotten writing; it might also be an allusion to those possibly apocryphal stories of spurned lovers sewing prawns into the spurners' curtain rods).The Hatchet Job of the Year, previously won by critics Adam Mars-Jones and Camilla Long, is the duck/rabbit of the literary prize season. Viewed one way, what's to dislike? It takes a welcome hatpin to the balloon of literary pomposity; it declares war on the bland book review and the log-rolling backslap. The prize locates itself firmly in the traditions of seductively... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2014-02-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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