Stella Rimington was especially interesting because of her Man Booker experience where five judges elected from 138 novels published in the UK first a long list of 13 titles and then a shortlist of five titles. There was considerable controversy at the time because the titles on both lists were regarded as being "too popular".
One of the difficulties with being a Man Booker judge is that no criteria is stated for judging so Stella Rimington and her panel elected to select titles that would appeal to the average intelligent reader. I could have listened to her talking alone about this for the whole hour.
Jenny Patrick, (right), who was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship but has never been shortlisted for awardds for any of her enormously popular historical novels talked about the secret disappointment of this. She also expressed the widely held view that a shortlist of three is too few for the fiction category compared to the five on the shortlist of the non-fiction categories.Stephen Stratford whom the Chair introduced as the person who has judged more NZ book awards than anyone else talked about authors and publishers getting cross with judges if their books were not shortlisted. It was rather alarming to hear Stratford suggest on three occasions that he regarded book awards as largely a waste of time in terms of increasing book sales.To back this up he quoted his local bookseller in his country town and the Paper Plus chain.