Winning Isn’t Everything

Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit lost the Booker to Alan Hollinghurt’s The Line of Beauty yesterday, but Dangor is a happy man.

Bitter Fruit has been selling in the tens of thousands since it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a level of commercial success he says he never expected. “My book was a little tiny book published in South Africa and the United States and now they tell me 30 000 copies sold in two weeks in the UK. That is significant.”

Last weekend, Edward Wyatt commented on the sales power of the Booker relative to American book prizes like the National Book Awards.