2007 Man Booker Prize Judges

The TurboBookSnob would like to thank her husband for generously agreeing to write the biographies of this year's judges, and for applying his own outrageous sense of humour and unique style to this page, and enabling the TurboBookSnob to avoid rehashing the formal biographies that are presented on the Man Booker Prize web site.

Howard Davies is a “Master of the Universe” with a penchant for the arts. His political and business connections are so ubiquitous and robust that one would be forgiven for assuming the man would be an albatross in a literary context. Still, Mr. Howard has published a book of his own (even though its subject was economics). He is on the board of the Royal Academy of Music, and surprisingly is a Patron of Working Families. My best wishes to the other judges this year; art background aside, years in the highest levels of the corporate world are certain to mean this guy is going to want his way, and having worked in America will likely mean he'll be willing to use the nuclear option even when deciding where to go to lunch.

Poet Wendy Cope has very little professional experience with novels, but if you ever saw her body of work you would understand that it's probably because she hasn't had time (not because she hasn't been able). Her list of credentials is so long as to be tedious if enumerated, and her career as a published author didn't even start until she was 35 yrs old in 1980.

Besides writing poetry, Ms. Cope has also published two children's books and edited more poetry anthologies than a fiction fan would likely read in her lifetime. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. I don't know what her personality is like, but if she gets any flack from the chair of the judges, she will be well within her credentials to slap him around and tell him how it is.

With quite a few authors from Africa publishing novels this year, Giles Foden might have felt compelled to throw them a bone; instead he either just sneered and quipped: been there, done that, or he ignored the brotherhood of countrymen and got behind the best books published.   Foden is the author of the novel The Last King of Scotland, which was recently made into critically successful movie. He is the judge with the lightest qualifications, with only four novels under his belt, and only one of those novels was read by anyone other than book nerd/snobs like my beautiful wife. Now that I've badmouthed Mr. Foden, I have to say he knows his Africa and he knows his irony.

Although I wouldn't call The Last King of Scotland a Moral Indignation Novel, because it acknowledges the complexities and mixed blessings of colonialism, even I'm astute enough to see the irony in the author of a book which makes a fortune writing about the maladies of post-colonial Uganda, when he grew up in that very country living with his family who were farmers.

Ruth Scurr is person who should have been the chair of the Booker Prize committee for 2007. If she was, we might have had a longlist release date, and more than just 13 books in the longlist. There, I said it.

She's the flat-out Super book-nerd PhD hottie, who just happens to have enough qualifications to make anybody second guess themselves at the thought of disagreeing with her. Especially about France - for gods sake don't question her about anything related to France, the Revolution, the Enlightenment, Robespierre, or anything else that happened there before WWI in 1914. My advice to the judges is just not to piss her off.

Imogen Stubbs is the cover identity for an MI-6 double agent whose real name is Nor Al Faed. Having grown up in Saudi Arabia and fighting in Afghanistan in the Mujahadin, she is thought to be the third wife of world famous terrorist Osama Bin Laden, and his closest confidant and deputy. She is known to have smuggled nuclear secrets from Pakistan to Iran in the late 1990s but she was turned by two other MI-6 double agents: Imelda Staunton and Emma Thompson on the set of Sense and Sensibility in 1995.

Stubbs ran afoul of Tony Blair's government in January 2003 when she was overheard telling people at a cast party that Saddam knew the invasion was coming within weeks, and that he had already given all his WMDs to his best friend and lover Osama Bin Laden, who was visiting Iraq in November 06 as he had done yearly for the past decade.

Stubbs is thought to have brokered the deal to sell 20B Pounds worth of British and American arms to Saudi Arabia. Moussad sources say she is currently rumored to be running marketing and distribution for a North Korean company who specializes in Land mines and biological weapons.

Seriously, though, Ms. Stubbs is an actor, and there isn't a ton of information available about her. The TurboBookSnob's husband invented this bio. Ms. Stubbs can contact the TurboBookSnob at wendy@turbobooksnob.com to take issue with this bio!