Salt of the edge

In wake of the latest Booker Prize controversy – in which winner, DBC Pierre, announced his prize money would be used to pay off $200,000 in drug debts – the New York Times looks back on other disruptions to the award’s “late-night black-tie somnolence”: “In 1994 the Scottish writer James Kelman delivered a rousing denunciation of English imperialism. In 1985 Keri Hulme, home in New Zealand and informed by satellite phone that she had unexpectedly won for The Bone People, exclaimed, her voice amplified across the banquet hall, ‘Aw, bloody hell!'”