Like a rolling stone: Gunty bags début gong

To the Big W’s Piccadilly flagship for the inaugural Waterstones Début Fiction Prize—the Bea-cons or the Carvalhos, ceremony-goers were sharply divided on which nickname to use—a welcome fillip to our blighted literary gong-scape. A pleasant surprise on arrival: Waterstones actually had stock of the six shortlisted books! Proof, I reckon, that the Hub and its Blue Yonder software problems (or Poo Yonder, as its booksellers seem to be calling it) are well and truly behind the chain. One imagines, however, that it will take a lot longer to deal with the shop floor staff’s collective PTSD from managing angry hordes of feral teenagers upset that the Leigh Bardugo or Ali Hazelwood or whoever else is au courant on their FYPs (I hear A N Wilson’s backlist is really blowing up on TikTok at the moment) were not on the shelves.

The only thing cool in the room was the reception one got when asking Fourth Estaters what the heck happened with Nick Pearson

It was a hot and sticky night and at times the room got as sweaty as a warmbox yoga class. Many, therefore, congregated around Bonnier’s newest hire Melissa Cox, the sole person clever enough to bring her own fan. “My mum told me I would need it,” she admitted. The only thing cool in the room was the reception one got when asking Fourth Estaters what the heck happened with Nick Pearson.

With out-of-towners on the shortlist it was a hybrid ceremony with readings, kicked off by the, ahem, tree-mendously named Sequoia Nagamatsu via videolink “from the mountains of Vermont” (hopefully, Nagamatsu wasn’t anywhere near Ezra Miller’s drugs and guns-filled farm). It was a pre-record, so young Nagamatsu had no opportunity to read the room and while he chose a compelling passage, goodness me it did go on. As the minutes ticked agonisingly by, you could almost see the internal calculus of the attendees: “There are six authors: will they all take this long? My wine glass is nearly empty, is it rude to retreat to the drinks table? Will I make the last Tube? Or am I going to end up staying the night at Piccadilly, sleeping top to tail in the beflowered ‘Bridgerton’-themed love seat in the fiction section with Larry Finlay and Nick Davies?”

But we were back on serve with the IRL Louise Kennedy, who after effusively thanking her editor, Bloomsbury’s Alexis Cherrytree, wheeled us through a short, scabrous and riotously funny section of her novel that “I was banned from reading on Radio Ulster because it was too filthy”. I cannot repeat much of it as I got the vapours after the mentions of “dirty tits” and “fuck the Pope”, so much is a blur, but I can tell you it went down a storm.

Good on winner Tess Gunty for gamely returning to the UK for the ceremony, as the souvenir from her last visit was a nasty case of Covid. To be frank, it could be worse this trip. The pride of South Bend, Indiana—other famous faces include former US presidential candidate “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg and your man who played Hank on “Breaking Bad”—now lives in LA and if Gunty fancies comparing SoCal surf culture against Blighty’s beaches, there’s a good chance she contracts cholera from our sewage-infested waters.

Also on hand was Gunty’s Knopf US editor John Freeman, once of Granta, who was wearing the cheery, relaxed expression of seemingly everyone who used to work for Sigrid Rausing. But the author’s triumph was another notch on the prize belt for Gunty’s UK publisher Juliet Mabey and Novin Doostdar’s Oneworld, continuing a ridiculously fecund run. How do they do it? “We know what we want and know how to get it,” Mabey said, either consciously or unconsciously paraphrasing “Anarchy in the UK”. Either way, Oneworld seems pretty punk to me.