The judging process for the 2008 William Hill sports book of the year was the most difficult of recent years. And in Marcus Trescothick's pain-streaked memoir, Coming Back to Me, it produced a most unusual winner.
It's only the second time the prize has gone to an autobiography; Lance Armstrong's It's Not About the Bike won in 2000. It's also just the second occasion on which a ghostwritten effort has prevailed; Sally Jenkins told Armstrong's story, while Trescothick has downloaded his agony (world-class cricketer succumbs to mental illness) via the keyboard of Peter Hayter. And this year's winner is unique in that the sporting content of the book is its least compelling component.
The judging proved troublesome in two ways. In recent times there have been some quite obvious winners. 2005's My Father and Other Working-Class Football Heroes by Gary Imlach was one, as was last year's victor, Duncan Hamilton's Provided You Don't Kiss Me. In these years, the panel - composed for some while now of John Inverdale, Alyson Rudd, the award's inventor John Gaustad, Hugh McIlvanny and myself - just acknowledge the obvious, then tuck into an excellent supper.
This year wasn't like that. Strong briefs were held for several books on the shortlist. The argument raged through the main course, the desserts and the coffees; bottles remained unopened. In the end, though, after several Twelve Angry Men-style secret ballots, it was thought that Trescothick's book was the most deserving. Other sportsmen - Tony Adams, Frank Bruno, Stan Collymore - have recounted their descents into turmoil, alcoholism and depression, but none had fallen as steeply as Trescothick or gone so daringly far on the page.
Even the sometimes thorny issue of ghostwriting was this time brushed aside. Indeed, it was felt that having a confidante and a conduit may well have helped Trescothick lay bare the gruelling experiences behind his book.
Danny Kelly
Victory for a gifted self-publicist in the Bad Sex award was flagged up as likely in this column last week, and it was indeed Rachel Johnson who collected the trophy from Dominic West, the Old Etonian star of The Wire and The Devil's Whore, for a passage in Shire Hell. Penguin, her publisher, turned out to be double winners, as John Updike was given a lifetime award ("he's been shortlisted four times, he's tried so hard," said Alexander Waugh, son of Auberon Waugh, the award's founder).
Winning this prize, though, is not necessarily good for one's future career: Salman Rushdie had gone "bonkers" since his triumph, Waugh contended, while Sebastian Faulks had been so alarmed by being mocked that his latest effort was "a James Bond novel without a sex scene".
Each shortlisted scene is traditionally read by actresses to a champagne-sozzled audience, and the winners in fact elicited less laughter than overblown passages by the rebranded Simon Montefiore, Kathy Lette and Paulo Coelho. With every purple line, implausible utterance and dodgy metaphor cheered, this prizegiving is, in its eccentric, inverted way, a celebration of language.
John Dugdale
A list of bands that derived their names from books - compiled by Tim d'Arch Smith and run on the literary blog Bookride (bookride.com) - is so lengthy as to make you wonder if there are any bands with decent names (excluding the Beatles and Rolling Stones) that didn't. Among those included are Bronski Beat (Grass), the Doors (Huxley), the Fall (Camus), Heaven 17, Moloko (Burgess), My Chemical Romance (Welsh), Level 42 (Adams), Soft Machine, the Soft Boys, Steely Dan (Burroughs) and the Thompson Twins (Hergé), with others such as the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground and Tears for Fears mentioned as borrowing their brands from non-fiction or obscure books rather than novelists. Welcome, too, is the information that there are, or were, bookish combos called Benny Profane, Augie March, The Bell Jar, Dorian Gray, Love and Squalor, Look Back in Anger and S/Z, that the Dead Milkmen owe their name to a Mr Macon "Milkman" Dead III in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, and that a band called Modest Mouse drew inspiration from an all too characteristic reference to "modest mouse-coloured people" in a Virginia Woolf story.
John Dugdale
I met Barack Obama a month ago, and handed him a copy of a book I've spent the last two years working on: State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. It was enormously satisfying to do this because the book, like this moment in American history, is all about reclaiming patriotism. My co-editor Matt Weiland and I modeled State by State, which contains 50 of our greatest novelists, reporters, and memoirists writing essays on the 50 states (plus Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones providing the sad facts on Washington DC—a capitol built, quite literally, by slavery), on the guide books of the Federal Writers' project, a Depression-era literary program designed to get the economically devastated United States to take pride in itself by employing the best writers of that time to describe our history and landscape, state by state, in 48 volumes (this was before Alaska and Hawaii were part of the union). A very Obama enterprise. More Obama than Roosevelt, really—when questioned about handing out federal money to unemployed writers like Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, and Richard Wright, FDR could only say, "They are human beings. They have to live." Obama is more alive to writers' potential to inspire. And this was what I found when I met him.
Some convoluted patriotic background led to both meeting and project. Before working on State by State Matt and I collaborated on an anthology about the 32 countries in the World Cup. The premise was that national characters could be understood through the lens of soccer. For two Americans a book about soccer trafficked in the opposite of knee-jerk patriotism—a fascination with other countries and ways of life, a very Obama endeavor. (Having read Dreams From My Father I am sure he will be at the 2010 tournament in Africa, and that the US will win—but, of course, when it comes to soccer I am an insane person.) The piece I wrote for the soccer book's intro goes on a hyperbolic tangent about history and jingoism. I wrote about the only-in-America experience of watching the 1970 World Cup in 2002 with no idea who'd win. As a result of this experience I found that, when viewing past events from the safety of the present, national identity peels away, patriotism dissolves, and, with nothing at stake, countries are pure underdogs and overdogs, and you can support them accordingly, free from the burden of imperatives, moral or otherwise. Taking this freedom as far as I could take it, watching the 1970 World Cup in 2002-3, I avoided rooting for Brazil, despite the beauty of their play, because rooting for Brazil in soccer seemed like rooting for my own country in the many wars (just and unjust) it has fought. Too easy. A reviewer on Amazon wrote: "Sean Wilsey confesses that he 'roots' for countries at war (and, apparently, against the United States because he favors the 'underdog'). It might be best to skip page 6 if you would like to bypass this revolting notion." This gave me some small insight into what it must be like to be a politician. Meanwhile, in 2006, I was rooting madly for the US team. Because in soccer, much more real than real life, or some fantasy revival of the past (we didn't qualify in '70 anyway), I damn well love America. What's not to love about a country that effortlessly fields a team of black, white and Asian players while the Spanish team is coached by an outright racist and the Italians all look the same? And as an American I sometimes believe our most cherished freedom is the freedom to speak ill of America, or even hate it. We only hate the things we care deeply about. So the climate of institutionalized patriotism so rampant in America over the last eight years, one of the most troubling signs of the corrosion of our country's soul, and my tiny brush with it, made me want to do something that was truly patriotic. A book about the 50 states!
When we decided to do this Barack Obama, like a lot of the states in the middle of the country, was obscure to me. He'd written a memoir and delivered a great speech, and that's about all I know. But as I came to know the country through the writers we'd assigned to describe it, Dagoberto Gilb on Iowa, Randall Kenan on North Carolina, Susan Orlean on Ohio, and more coming in every week, I also got to know Barack Obama through his astounding series of victories and upsets, and the reviving effect of hearing truthful, beautiful and courageous words spoken by a politician for the first time in my life. I began to feel that I was getting to know the country as he was getting to know the country, and the country was getting to know him, and that I was working on this book for him. And as we both kept piling up the states he inspired me to keep giving everything I had to a project that seemed quite likely to be thankless (what could be more unlikely to succeed than an anthology on the 50 states?), much as his presidential aspirations seemed sure to end in failure (what could be more impossible than a black president?)—but this is the way people without patriotism think. Eventually, wanting him to win, and wanting to experience the country I was falling in love with through all these writers describing it in such generous detail—Charles Bock on Nevada, Andrea Lee on Pennsylvania, Carrie Brownstein on Washington—I went to Indiana (Susan Choi) with my wife and small children (Owen, age 4, and Mira, age 1) and we all worked as volunteers in the Obama campaign's Muncie office. Then we registered voters in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where an elderly white woman pointed to me as I pushed my daughter in her stroller, and shouted, "You're a nigger lover!" I could only laugh—I was an America lover. I canvassed in Mequon, Wisconsin (intimately described by my wife, Daphne Beal, who makes her state feel like an extension of herself) and wound up in Appalachian Ohio on election day, with people shouting "Obama's a nigger!" at us while their friends and relatives, people who had never met a person of color, went out and voted for one.
Matt and I got a six figure advance for State by State and spent most of it paying the writers for their pieces and sending a dozen of them to their states. And while we certainly made a lot less than minimum wage for all the time we put into the book, I wanted to do something with the money I got for editing and writing the introduction, which I sold to the London Review of Books. My take from Harper Collins and the intro serial was supposed to be $27,300. A few days before leaving to register voters in Pennsylvania, I received a personal email from Kevin Jennings, a memoirist, amazingly enough, working for Obama, saying that according to campaign records, "you are legally allowed to donate $28,500 to the Obama Victory Fund" described as "a committee of the DNC which exists solely to raise and spend funds for the Presidential campaign." I had already given $2,300, which I'd understood to be the maximum allowed by law. But, wanting to do everything I could, and this sum being so close to the money I was making from State by State, I gave them the full amount. Then I received an email with details about the "last event with Senator Obama."
I arrived early, with State by State in hand, and was given a seating assignment at what seemed to be the kids' table—way in the back, as far away as possible from a stand and microphone. Everyone else was either a lawyer or in finance. This, I discovered, made me fascinating. I tried to get some useful financial advice from Mark Gallogly, a youthful looking man, eyes alight with business acumen and curiosity, he asked me who'd written about Rhode Island, and when I told him Jhumpa Lahiri, he got animated about her writing. The book was passed around.
Gallogloy told me, "You've got to meet Reggie and make sure he keeps this for him." Reggie was Reggie Love, a former basketball star from Duke, who's Obama's "body man," the person in charge of the details. He came by, and it turned out that we had a mutual friend, with whom I'd consumed unadvisable amounts of tequila. Reggie knew the feeling. "I've seen the bottom of a lot of margaritas with that guy," he said.
Barack Obama arrived through a small door right next to our table, talked to Mark Gallogly, addressed the crowd, and then made his way back to us. When he turned to shake my hand, for some reason I chose to address him by his first name, saying, "Barack, I brought you this book."
To present a book reader with a book is to not have a conversation. He took it and immediately started reading. I went into the history of the Federal Writers Project, and he looked up to say, "Yes, I know about it."
Engrossed, he kept reading.
I said, "OK, so this is an homage and an updated version of the WPA Guides. Some of our greatest writers have written original essays for it. And you figure into the Illinois piece, by Dave Eggers."
He kept reading.
This photo of him and the book is one of six. As I handed it to him I was thinking "We, all of us, did this for you." I think you can see that in the picture. Then the photographer stood there and took picture after picture. There's a gallery of the event on her website, and in it he stops and talks to every other person for two or three shots. But writing slowed him down.
Finally I said, "I donated my part of the book's advance in order to be here, and I can't think of a better use for the money."
This broke his concentration. He is a writer. And he said, "Woah. Thank you."
Sean Wilsey
· This article was amended on Friday December 5 2008. A shorter version of Sean Wilsey's piece was published on Saturday November 29 2008. This shorter version has been replaced by Wilsey's longer, original version