At this proposal, the eyes of the other committee members had lit up with excitement, and after many hours’ enthusiastic discussion, it was decided that the Winshaw Prize, in its first year, should be encumbered with absolutely no rules and no boundaries. Accordingly, the shortlisted entries for that year consisted of a book of short stories, a hip-hop single, a video of an artist writing anticapitalist slogans in letters made out of his own snot, a new strain of apple created by a fruit farmer in Herefordshire and the giraffe enclosure at Chester Zoo. This policy was continued for some time, culminating in the notorious edition of 2001, when the prize was awarded to ‘the distinctive smell you get when you visit your grandmother’s house and open a biscuit tin which has been empty for five years’.
The steering committee, however, became ever more aware that the prize had failed to capture the public imagination. It proved too challenging to interest the media in a prize which, every year, was awarded to a mere abstraction. Despite the best efforts of Pott Bellinger, the PR firm engaged to publicize it, the Winshaw Prize was far outstripped, in terms of column inches and front-page splashes, by the Booker, the Turner, the Baileys, the Costa, the Brits, the BP Portrait Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Rear of the Year and countless others. It was while contemplating this list of more successful rivals, one melancholy morning, that Trending had his second great idea. Of course! How could he have not seen it before? Later that week he gathered the other committee members for an Extraordinary Special Meeting and presented them with his proposaclass="underline"
‘This prize,’ he argued, ‘is meant to commemorate Roderick Winshaw and, by extension, the whole of his family. Now, when we think of the Winshaws, what do we think of? What did they believe in, above all? The answer, of course, is competition. Competition between individuals, between companies, between nations. Competition, that is, in the sense of a fight to the death. Winner takes all, loser gets nothing. And what is an artistic prize but the very distillation of this idea — and a perfect poke in the eye to all those sentimentalists who still believe that artistic creation is some sort of haven from competition. There is no such haven, in this day and age! No one believes any more that the arts world is some sort of socialist utopia, in which different creative spirits work on their different projects side by side, in parallel and in sympathy. Things have changed, as they have everywhere else! It’s a free marketplace now. Survival of the fittest, and extinction for everyone else. So let’s put artist in competition with artist, let’s set writer against writer and musician against musician. Let envy, rivalry, economic uncertainty and status anxiety be the new spurs to creativity! What we need to create, by rebooting the Winshaw Prize, is a sort of über-prize. The ultimate prize. The prize to end all prizes. Do you see what I mean, ladies and gentlemen? Do you understand what I have in mind?’
There was an expectant silence. Nobody had yet seen the logical conclusion of what he was saying.
‘From this year onwards,’ he concluded triumphantly, ‘the Winshaw Prize will be awarded to … the best prize in the United Kingdom.’
Around the table there was an audible gasp, at both the audacity and the simplicity of the idea. Of course! What better way to establish the Winshaw Prize’s superiority over every other award in the country? From now on the Booker, the Turner, the Mercury, the Stirling and all the others would be pitted against each other, every year, in deadly competition, and there would be no need to announce the criteria for judgement, since the fundamental meaninglessness of the comparison would be the whole point, and indeed the very origin of the prize’s prestige. There might well be a reluctance to cooperate on the part of the other prizes’ organizers, but that was not important. Prizes would be considered eligible whether they were officially entered or not, and besides, each annual ceremony would be so lavish, so glamorous, and would attract so much publicity, that in a few years everybody would be clamouring to take part. And so, indeed, it proved. The media quickly latched on to the idea and before long the presentation of the Winshaw Prize, which took place every November, became one of the biggest talking points in the calendar of British public life. After a shaky and somewhat predictable start (it was awarded to the Turner Prize in its first year, and to the Forward Poetry Prizes in its second) the Winshaw got into its stride and went from strength to strength. The shock year in 2005, when it was awarded to the little-known Giggleswick Prize for the best flower arrangement in the BD postal area, blew things wide open, making people realize that the prize was not just open to the ‘big hitters’ but to any plucky little independent outfit which happened to catch the judges’ attention. In 2008 the prize was opened to other European prizes and in 2011, in a bold and controversial move, to American prizes, making it a truly global and continent-spanning award. 2012 was a spectacular year, in which the Pulitzer Prize went head to head against the Nobel Prize for Physics, and yet the award was finally carried off, in a dramatic last-minute reversal, by France’s Prix Médicis Étranger. Every year, now, the Winshaw prize was getting bigger, and the stakes were getting higher. In financial terms alone it was now worth one million pounds to the lucky victor. 2013 promised to be another milestone in the prize’s history.
*
The venue for this year’s presentation was the new Library of Birmingham, which fronted on to Centenary Square in the very heart of the city. Its striking, monumental design by the Dutch architects Mecanoo proclaimed an unapologetic postmodernism, evident especially in its glittering façade, which was festooned with thousands of golden curlicues. Completed at an eye-watering cost to Birmingham City Council of some £187 million, the library had been heralded throughout the land as proof that Britain had not yet quite sunk into a state of illiteracy and philistinism, and was lauded effusively by prominent writers and other public figures, who remained unconcerned (or unaware) that the city — like most others in the country — was at the same time overseeing the closure of many smaller, less prestigious local libraries. (In fact it would soon transpire that the library itself had been far too expensive a project, and little more than a year after it opened, the City Council would announce that it needed to save £1.3 million per year on running costs, and that it had no option but to slash its opening hours and make about half of its staff redundant.) The Winshaw Prize committee felt, for all sorts of reasons, that no more appropriate venue could be found for this year’s award ceremony.
Although not designed for large-scale public functions, the library proved readily adaptable for the occasion. The entire ground floor was put to use, and sixty tables were brought in to accommodate the 720 lucky invitees. The police, the security services and Special Branch all had a substantial presence: this year’s guest list, after all, included Richard Dawkins, Tracey Emin, Michel Houellebecq and glamour-model-turned-singer Danielle Perry, so no one could afford to take any chances.
Security was tight, too, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, which stood opposite the library, and where most of the guests were booked to stay the night. And it was on the sixteenth floor of this hotel, in a king-size double room which commanded a fine view over the tower blocks and arterial roads of Birmingham city centre, that a painful scene was being played out, just one hour before the prize dinner was due to commence. Lucinda and Nathan were having their first argument.
‘I am so sorry about this,’ Nathan was saying.