Booker creator Maschler laments "ridiculous" winners

By Sophie Hardach

TOKYO (Reuters Life!) - Having published more than a dozen Nobel laureates, Tom Maschler believes inventing the Man Booker Prize has been his biggest achievement of all -- even if at least a quarter of the winners do not deserve the award.

From assembling Ernest Hemingway's notes and drafts into "A Moveable Feast" after the author's suicide, to buying the rights for Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" for $250, Maschler has put some of the greatest literary works of the 20th century between covers.

The Booker, which Maschler created some four decades ago, can catapult an obscure author to instant global fame and add 100,000 copies to their sales.

Not that Maschler thinks this is always a good thing.

"I must say that some Booker winners to me are ridiculous, but I don't have any influence over that," he told Reuters in Tokyo, where he was promoting his memoirs, "Publisher".

He cites Keri Hulme's "The Bone People", which was awarded the prize in 1985, as an example of an undeserved win.

"You wouldn't believe that it could win," he said. "But the judges are the judges. I would say a quarter to a third are choices that I would not have made."

The other two-thirds include many of Maschler's proteges at publishing house Jonathan Cape, such as Salman Rushdie, who won with "Midnight's Children" in 1981, or Ian McEwan, whose "Amsterdam" was chosen in 1998.