It is instructive to learn of the machinations that led to the final decision. Maureen Freely, one of the judging panel, wrote on “The complex problems of judging the Warwick prize” (The Guardian). There is one passage that bears highlighting, and it is presented as one answer to the question “What is complexity?”, and more specifically what does complexity mean in the context of the Warwick Prize?

If we accept that writing makes you think, and that the formation of knowledge depends partly on the complex and often playful process of writing, then what role does the process of writing perform on that very edge of ‘not knowing’ and ‘knowing’: a place of creativity, energy and adventure

Here’s the freedom – from sponsorship, external pressures – that such a brief creates:

If we had been confined to the usual categories, we would have been measuring the books up to some definition of a form. [...] But what a refreshing change it made to read 20 books for their ideas, and to track the ways in which the very act of writing changed them.

All this takes reflexivity and the inter-action in-between writing into another plane; in some sense, it requires that the judging panel and its criteria reside inside, or within, the writing process itself. I wonder how this will be re-defined for the 2011 Warwick Prize for Writing, the theme of which will be Colour.

The winner is Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. While I have reservations about the book’s general thesis, it is something that successfully motored the continued working of whatever remaining grey cells left in me, an aspect noted by the judging panel:

It has started many debates, and will start many more

Postscript:

See this profile of Klein in The New Yorker.

While we’re on the subject of prizes, money and prize money, spare a thought for Colin Robinson, who was recently despatched from his position as editor at “a large publisher in New York”.