Scot wins £10,000 book prize that rewards second best
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Your support makes all the difference.As a literary achievement, following up a debut novel with an equally successful second work can be as difficult as getting your name into print in the first place.
The Encore Award is unique in recognising second books and yesterday it was given to the Scottish writer Ali Smith for Hotel World, which had been shortlisted for both the last Booker and Orange prizes. Forty-two second novels were submitted for the £10,000 prize which was founded by Lucy Astor with a charitable trust given to her by her father.
John Murray-Browne, a bookshop owner and one of the three judges, paid tribute to Smith's book, which weaves together the lives of five women and their connection to a hotel. "We thought it was a spectacular bit of writing – moving, funny in places, and clever. We just thought it was outstanding."
Smith's first novel, Like, was published in 1997.
Literary history is littered with writers who struggled to produce a second novel after a dazzling first, or who never repeated the greatness achieved on their debut.
Kingsley Amis spent a career writing books that would be forever compared with his first, Lucky Jim. Apart from Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger is scarcely known among the general public.
Alex Garland, a more recent publishing phenomenon, found his second book, Tesseract, was a relative flop compared to The Beach.
"The most notable except-ion, whose second novel did much better than their first, was Salman Rushdie with Midnight's Children," Mr Murray-Browne said. Other famous second novels that have bettered their predecessors includeOliver Twist, Pride and Prejudice and Ulysses.
Mr Murray-Browne said he thought it was a very worthwhile prize which, he suspected, had attracted most of the second novels in Britain last year. "I think there is an increasing pressure in the publishing world to find a new author so that first novels are having a slightly better time of it than in the past and the second novel is more difficult," he said.
"But almost half the total [of books submitted] were good books. So the second novel is in robust good form."
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