ON WINNING – AND LOSING
06 April 2011
‘The Vampire Blog’has just won a prize – The Nottinghamshire Brilliant Book Award. I am extremely pleased – and highly relieved.
Let me explain. Last year I had the strange phenomenon of having a book, ‘The TV Time Travellers’ nominated for a record-breaking number of awards – without winning a single one of them.
Now, as Philip Pullman has observed: ‘Being nominated is the important thing.’ He’s right. To have your book picked as one of the five or six best of the year is a wonderful piece of recognition, and to have it happen over and over should give you a real sense of achievement. And it does. But yet …
But yet I’m also reminded of a quote of Charlie Brown’s. ‘It doesn’t matter if you win or lose – until you lose.’
And when your book is short listed and doesn’t take away the prize it does feel as if you’ve lost. Especially at a ceremony last year when ‘The TV Time Travellers,’ didn’t win. Again. And before I’d even finished clapping and contorting my face into some kind of plucky loser’s smile, a teacher patted me on the shoulder and asked me if I’d read the winning book, and when I replied I hadn’t, she told me I should as if was ‘just marvellous,’ and she was sure I’d ‘love it.’
Of course, the other problem with being nominated is you start wanting the prize, even imagining yourself winning it. When I was younger I imagined myself tripping down the steps to be interviewed by Parkinson. Sometimes then I’d written a book which sold a million copies a minute. Other times I’d captained England when they won the World Cup. Occasionally I even did both. Now as an adult, I’m afraid I’m still an ardent day- dreamer regularly coming up against the acid breath of reality.
Anyway, after a year of no wins, ‘The Vampire Blog’ was short listed for The Brilliant Book Award in January and after a brief moment of joy I had a quick squint at the ‘books I was up against’ (and that’s the exact phrase people use) I decided it was an extremely strong short list and not to think about it again.
And I really didn’t (well, only very occasionally) until I received that note of congratulations … Perhaps that’s the secret. Expect nothing.
The next award ceremony I attend will be The Hackney Short Novel Award day in May. But this time I’m a neutral observer as I’m just chairing the ceremony. Win or lose though I shall know exactly what those five short listed authors are going through.