John Berger, 2009. Wikimedia Commons/Ji-Elle. Some rights reserved.This is the text of a speech given by John Berger, on accepting the Booker Prize for Fiction, at the Café Royal in London, 23 November 1972.
Since you have awarded me this prize, you may like to know, briefly, what it means to me.
The competitiveness of prizes I find distasteful. And in the case of this prize the publication of the shortlist, the deliberately publicised suspense, the speculation of the writers concerned as though they were horses, the whole emphasis on winners and losers is false and out of place in the context of literature.
