From the Academy

Prizes are a powerful means of celebrating books that might otherwise fail to find due recognition. We asked our Academicians to imagine that the Folio Prize had existed through time, and to nominate a book that they would like to have seen win. Some of their choices qualify as truly undiscovered, while others may not have received the attention they deserve, but they take in every kind of form, style and subject, and are all wonderful books.

You can see more of our Academicians' answers in 'From the Academy'

Boyd Tonkin on The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)

DH Lawrence published The Rainbow in 1915. It forms the middle passage in the great trio of novels that begins with Sons and Lovers and continues with the The Rainbow’s sort-of-sequel, Women in Love. From its matchless prelude as the Brangwen family settles into a landscape of the heart to the industrial, intellectual and sexual turmoil of its later sections, it finds a wonderfully rich but controlled shape for the inner and outer journey of three generations in a transforming country. In that first year of the Great War, would the book be loved, cherished, acclaimed? The opposite. The Rainbow – a novel in part about same-sex relationships by a working-class author married to a bohemian German aristocrat – was prosecuted for obscenity. Lawrence’s publisher meekly gave up the copies, which were – medievally – burnt. The crown prosecutor condemned “a mass of obscenity of thought, idea and action”. The persecution of his masterwork embittered Lawrence for life. It drove him into – first emotional, then geographical – exile. If some insult-proof prize judges, fearless and uncowed, had been around to defend Lawrence in 1915, would his future – and that of the English novel – have changed much? Let’s hope so.