Michael Portillo to Chair Man Booker Jury

Judges for the 2008 Man Booker Prize were announced last week, and Michael Portillo (left), who held several positions in former prime minister John Major’s cabinet and is now a frequent commentator for the BBC (and host of the show Dinner with Portillo), was selected to chair the committee. The other judges are book reviewer Alex Clark, novelist Louise Doughty, bookseller James Heneage, and BBC contributor Hardeep Singh Kohli. In other words, nobody who’s going to put a bug up snooty literati’s noses the way the Orange Prize organizers did when they named pop star Lily Allen a judge two weeks ago.

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