Some were reminded of John Berger’s reaction to his Booker prize triumph in 1972 this week after Philippe Sands’ East West Street was declared the winner of the inaugural Baillie Gifford prize. Berger said he would be sharing some of his £5,000 bonanza with the British Black Panthers (although it appears they no longer existed, having dissolved earlier that year), while Sands announced his £30,000 would go to a refugee charity. The tone of their speeches was starkly different, however: whereas Sands expressed gratitude to the non-fiction award’s new backer (it was formerly the Samuel Johnson prize), Berger scandalously bit the hand that fed him, excoriating the novel prize’s then sponsor, Booker-McConnell, for deriving its wealth from “130 years” of Caribbean exploitation.
Sands was far from being the first author in recent years to make a financial gesture. Two years ago, a pair of recipients of Australia’s Prime Minister’s Literary awards similarly gave money away: the joint fiction winner Richard Flanagan, (flush after just trousering the Man Booker prize’s £50,000, he gave his A$40,000 to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation), and the children’s fiction winner Bob Graham, who chose asylum seekers.
Also in Australia, the first three authors awarded the Stella prize for women’s fiction all donated part of their prizes to social causes - 2015 prizewinner Emily Bitto picked the Wilderness Society - although that sequence ended this year when Charlotte Wood said in her victory speech that she was keeping all of it, partly “to stake a claim for literature as an essential social benefit, in and of itself”.
Other writers who have gone for a giveaway include David Bodanis, who won the Aventis science book prize in 2006 and sent his £10,000 to the family of the government scientist David Kelly, who killed himself in 2003 after being exposed as a journalist’s source in the runup to the Iraq war.
Outright rejection of prizes is purer than the Berger approach, and that was the choice of Jean-Paul Sartre - although he bungled his rejection by sending his letter to the wrong organisation, so that by the time it was read after being forwarded his name had already been announced - when offered the Nobel literature prize in 1964, saying “a writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution”. But the price of that purity is denying financial support to cash-strapped people or causes, and Sartre’s letter acknowledged he was “tortured” by this issue, citing a London anti-apartheid organisation as where his money would have gone had he compromised his principles. (A former member of the Swedish Academy later claimed that in the 70s Sartre had second thoughts, making unsuccessful inquiries about regaining the prize money that had been returned to Stockholm after his election had been announced and then rescinded).
Hari Kunzru, however, managed, unlike Sartre, to remain uncontaminated yet ensure money went to those in need of it. He turned down the £5,000 John Llewellyn Rhys prize for young writers in 2003 because he objected to the “hostility” of its sponsor, the Mail on Sunday, to “black and Asian British people” and “refugees and asylum seekers”, and the paper agreed to his request that the winnings he never collected should go to the Refugee Council.
