Sir Trevor McDonald, chair of the judges, said Small Island had been a "clear winner".

"It is a brilliantly observed novel of a period of English history that many people seem not to know very much about.

[...] "Strangely enough I was one of the few people on the judging panel who had read a great deal of that period," he said.

"But I didn't need to sway the judges on that account. I wasn't the one who pushed the book. Everybody admired it enormously."

Today's next Zadie Smiths, after all, are merely the faded child stars of tomorrow, all burnt-out and bitter. Or, worse still, after initial world-shaking success, they are heaped with praise, fame and wealth in equal measure and become the Drew Barrymores of the literary world, incapable of a decent follow-up.

The literary hack, first cousin to the journalistic hack, wasn't exactly born yesterday.

Still, the rise of the writing schools has added whole new universes of meaning and possibility to hackery, a word that demands redefining above and beyond (or below and beneath?) its present meaning as, according to Webster, "a bullock cart" used in India. A career as a writer of fiction can now be pursued with precisely the same single-minded calculation as a career as a writer of insurance policies or medical prescriptions. Like business school or medical school, writing school now provides all the hoops through which the aspirant must jump and all the gradations by which accomplishment is measured. In what has been called the credentialed society, writers are now as credentialed as everyone else.

• Filed under We Did Not Get That Memo: "Chick lit has carved a solid niche in contemporary fiction; it ranges from exquisite post-feminist literature to excruciatingly brainless gal fluff."
• We agree with the Saloon: when it comes to lit awards, this one's got the worst name ever.
• "How well does the world wide web represent human language?" asks the Economist. AFAIK - LOL - not very.
• A poll of London's top 30 books ranks the city's A-Z street atlas over books by Woolf, Waugh, and Conrad.
• According to LA blog Defamer, Audrey Tatou has joined the Hanks-led cast of The Da Vinci Code, "instantly making the whole movie adorable and quirky."
• "Can you think better when you're typing?" Wouldn't know, I've never tried.

Your Sikh neighbours go bananas over Behzti, a play they weren't even planning to see, and you've got to sum up the ensuing kerfuffle. Does Doug capture the complexity of this culture clash? Sadly, no. His poem has the rhythms and repetitions of the crudest agit-prop - not to mention the chopped-up prose.

Spender's hedonist friend Cyril Connolly once warned that all excursions into journalism, broadcasting and magazine work, like the more obvious snares of society and the fashionable world, are largely traps for the unwary. These "enemies of promise" encourage poets and novelists to waste their best selves on unworthy projects, to dissipate the energy that should be reserved for masterpieces. It is a stern, high-minded dictum -- and one that Connolly himself could never follow, since, as Sutherland notes, he wasted the finest lapidary prose style of his generation on weekly book reviewing. Just so, Stephen Spender apparently couldn't refuse an invitation, and so awoke one day to find himself not Byron but rather Yeats's "sixty-year-old, smiling public man," ideally suited for visiting professorships and editorial boards, glamorous enough for talks, black-tie dinners and international literary festivities, an adornment to the book pages of London or New York and, finally, a required antique presence wherever two or three hundred were gathered together to honor the muses.