Judge reveals Booker tussles

The newly announced chairman of the 2005 Man Booker Prize has admitted the judges are unlikely to read all 130 books in the running.

John Sutherland, an emeritus professor of English at the University of London, also says this year's judging panel is "light on minorities", and likens the judging process to a "world federation wrestling match".

The £50,000 prize for contemporary fiction is one of the most respected in the literary world and Professor Sutherland's unusually frank remarks are likely to cause controversy. He said: "It takes six or seven hours to read a novel, and a judge is being paid about £3,000.

"You don't have to read the whole thing to know it doesn't qualify."

The professor was a judge in 1999 when he said of the then winner "everyone admired, no one passionately liked, JM Coetzee". His comments about the novel Disgrace were disputed by other judges.

Now he says of the judging: "At the beginning you have a very civilised conversation and everybody likes each other. Then there's the long list, and there's friction and heat. Tempers begin to fray - and then there's battle, head to head.

"After that there's the shortlist and people walk out and so forth, when Rushdie is missed off or whatever. So it goes from civilised conversation to a world federation wrestling match."

He added that although the prize is now an important event, it started in the Sixties as "a kind of joke - it was the Millennium Dome of literature."