Coin toss decided 1976 Booker prize

London, September 10

The 1976 Booker prize was decided by a coin toss as the two judges failed to agree on a winner, according to a new archive put online by the British Library.

Author David Storey won the 21,000-pound prize for his novel ‘Saville’ through sheer luck in 1976, after a three-judge panel was unable to decide on a winner, the prize’s former administrator, Martyn Goff, has revealed.

According to a report in ‘The Guardian’, an interview with the late Goff, made public in a new film from the British Library drawing on hundreds of hours of audio interviews about the prize, novelist Walter Allen and critic Francis King were torn between Storey’s novel and another book.

Mary Wilson, the poet and wife of PM Harold Wilson, should have had the deciding vote, but she was so offended by the amount of sex in that year’s novels she refused to take part in the debate. “She was sort of leaving it to the other two judges. And they could not agree and she didn’t want to vote, and we got to a total stalemate,” Goff said. — PTI