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'

Rupert Thomson on Already Dead by Denis Johnson (1997)

Already deadThough some of the novels I can’t live without are concise, finely-tuned pieces of work – So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, and Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje, to name just three – my idea of the perfect novel is, paradoxically, one that is flawed. A book with too much ambition, in other words. A book that swerves, and sprawls, and flatly refuses to abide by the rules. That’s why I’m awarding the Folio Prize to Already Dead by Denis Johnson. Set in California in the early 90s, it’s a visceral, anarchic, incendiary book. There is sex. There is menace. There is slapstick. And then there’s the language – and what language it is. On the level of the sentence, there are few writers who can match Denis Johnson for sheer virtuosity. Reading Already Dead, I often find myself thinking, Where did that come from? He approaches at such an oblique, unhinged angle that he achieves a new form of clarity. It shouldn’t work – but it does.