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.

White-haired with a deep tan, Maschler, who spends much of his time at his house in southern France, speaks with the confidence of someone who is used to being right.

Asked about his proudest moments, he says he finds it difficult to name a selection because he has had hundreds of them; asked about moments of professional failure, he cannot remember a single one.

His face softens when he starts to talk about his favorite books and the thrill of bringing out masterpieces such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "One Hundred Years of Solitude": "I had never read anything like it."

"IRREPRESSIBLE"

Born in Berlin in 1933, Maschler moved to Vienna with his family as a small boy before the Nazis forced them to flee to England. Three of his grandparents were murdered in concentration camps. His father, Kurt Maschler, a publisher whose star author was Erich Kaestner, founded the Atrium Verlag in Switzerland when Hitler came to power to sell books that were banned in Germany.

Maschler's memoirs reveal little about his family and his personal life, and he is reluctant to talk about his father. While he describes him as brave, it appears that relations between them were tense.

Maschler initially did not want to follow his father into publishing, but after futile attempts to break into the film industry, he gave in. He says his family background has not influenced him much.