Kishwar Desai | Booker sugar daddies' of lit; Liz's bestseller toast of town

In this brave new world where everyone is being politically correct, it is something of a conundrum to find that the prize that most authors vie for may also have a dark history. So can we still call the “Booker” Prize by its name despite the fact that the Booker brothers’ family, which had originally supported it, had a history of enslavement? Though this has been known for a few years — the debate came up again after a radio host Richie Brave pointed out last week that the online information on the Booker website stated that the brothers Josias and George Booker had “managed” around 200 enslaved people. This, he said, was sanitisation of history, as his family had been enslaved by the Bookers, and not been “managed”. And his original surname was Booker. 

While the information on the Booker website was duly corrected — and of course the prize is now being managed by Crankstart, a charitable foundation — the links of the name to slavery continue to raise questions. 

In fact it was eight years after the abolition of the slave trade, in 1815, that Josias Booker, from Liverpool, landed in Demerara and enslaved people in a cotton plantation in what was British Guiana. Sugar then became the primary crop in a number of other plantations leading the original Booker Prize sponsors to be known as the “sugar daddies”. Now we know where the term comes from — and it isn’t a pleasant connection!

However, the organisers of the Prize website have said that they will get a Guyanese historian to recapitulate what was the actual history of the Booker brothers — who were also recompensed for their losses after slavery was abolished in 1834. Much of this makes one wonder if the Booker should have changed its name?

But then so many universities and other institutions have links to founders with dubious pasts that the process would be endless. Perhaps the best would be to do what the Booker organisers are doing — leave the name alone — but give more information about the original founders. Will this make the authors who have won the prize happy to have received it by simply saying that it was in the distant past? Or does it mean the name make them uncomfortable? The jury is out on that.

Well… books can definitely change the perception the world has about you, even if you don’t win prizes for them! The shortest serving British Prime Minister we all know of — Liz Truss — has just written a bestseller, Ten Years to Save the West. 

She may have lasted only 50 odd days as Prime Minister, crashed the economy, spooked the markets and the Conservative Party — but she is unrepentant and resilient. No sooner were the first 1,500 copies released that the book was sold out. The lettuce has flowered. What next? Surely not Prime Minister once more — or maybe like Boris Johnson she will become a super successful columnist and author earning millions of pounds! To be fair the reviews of the book — which is partly memoir and partly a “call to action” (seriously?) — has been called both “unintentionally hilarious” and “insightful” depending on which side of the political spectrum the critics come from. And she will definitely be on the book festival circuit if not at the hustings. 

This time it seems my diary is all about books, and authors. A most lovely story has surfaced by chance about an iconic British creative personality, Agatha Christie, who became famous as a writer of detective fiction with her Hercule Poirot character — as well as plays like The Mousetrap which is still running after decades. During the First World War, like many women from respectable families, she volunteered to work in a hospital set up at the Town Hall in Torquay, Devon. Now aspects of this experience have been found in a “handmade” magazine she and her fellow nurses put together. The magazine was called What We Did In The Great War — and covers her attempts at being an agony aunt, signing off as “your loving aunt Agatha” while she gave light hearted advice to her colleagues. She also worked in the medicines section where she is said to have learnt so much about chemicals and poisons.

To keep her group amused she became an agony aunt and developed her writing talent while serving the nation. But it was during the war that she finished and submitted her first piece of work which launched her on her life long career — The Mysterious Affair of Styles — this would finally be published three years later… after being rejected by six publishers. 

Quite by accident — the magazine was found inside the papers of Sylvia Payne, a British psychoanalyst who was also at Torquay at the time. It will now be displayed at the Royal College of Nursing in London.