From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about the books shortlisted for the 2014 Prize, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

Esi Edugyan on Middlemarch by George Eliot (1874) and I am Not Jackson Pollock by John Haskell (2003)

Of course there are so many worthy works. For classics, I would award George Eliot’s Middlemarch. An exquisite achievement on every level, and a work of enduring genius. I stand in awe of her. For contemporary fiction, John Haskell’s I Am Not Jackson Pollock. A startling collection of stories that combines fact with fiction, research with rumour, to create something delicious, and strange, and both very new and very old. If the art of fiction is (at least in part) the art of juxtaposition and surprise, then this is the master class. Haskell’s stories can turn on a dime.