Novelist Julian is no mug as he tops shortlist for Not The Booker Award

Date Published: {J}

He first came to the public eye as the singer with post punk Galway band Toasted Heretic in the late 1980s, then Julian Gough turned his hand to writing novels.

His latest, Jude in London has now topped the shortlist for the Guardian Not the Booker prize, the result of which will be announced in London in October, to coincide with the actual Booker Prize.

The Not the Booker Prize began in 2009 after some people complained that the Booker Prize judging process was too elite.

The prize for the alternative event is a Guardian mug – a far cry from the £50,000 Booker award, but being shortlisted does guarantee significant discussion of the book, especially among the online reading community.

Julian’s achievement in topping the shortlist is especially impressive, because the Not the Booker shortlist was announced on August 18 – and Jude in London isn’t due to be published until September 6.

His quest to make the shortlist saw him embark on an unusual campaign in which he emailed copies of the, as yet, unpublished novel to Guardian readers so they could write a 150-word review to submit to the judges. Julian ran a campaign on his blog, where he explained that he’d give the book to readers for free, hoping a sufficient number would nominate it. But they weren’t obliged to do so.

However, he requested that if they read it and liked it that they might buy a copy of Jude in London for a friend. That was to satisfy his publishers who were supportive of Julian’s campaign, but wary of giving away 100 copies of the unpublished book.

“We had a week to get a community of patient reviewers to read it,” explains Julian from Berlin, where he lives with his partner Ann Marie Fives and their six-year-old daughter, Sophie.

In total, he ended up getting 46 nominations – 11 more than his nearest rival.

“It’s about trying to use

the internet to do new things. I love the energy you can borrow from people. There were a few people I knew who had read and reviewed it, but the vast majority of reviews were from people I hadn’t met,” he explains.

The Not the Booker award is chaotic and has all the excess of the internet,” he says with relish.

However, on a serious note, it is also an attempt to see if a whole bunch of people can come up with a better list than the Booker. It is also “a test bed” for new ways of reading and fighting about books.

“I think people should fight about books more often. If we really care about books and literature, we’d be more passionate about them.”

Julian certainly has been passionate about his writing career, and spent some time on the breadline when he was writing his previous novel, Jude, Level 1.

“I was evicted in Ireland in 2006, during the Celtic Tiger years when there were higher rents,” he laughs. But it wasn’t funny at the time.

“We wandered around for a bit, staying in Dublin first where friends loaned us a house on half rent, but after a while we couldn’t even afford that so we got one for no rent in France and it was brilliant,” he recalls.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.