Not So Curious Incident: Haddon Wins Whitbread Book of the Year

by Amanda-Jane Doran, PW Daily for Booksellers -- Publishers Weekly, 1/29/2004

The £30,000 ($45,000) Whitbread Book of the Year prize was won last night by children's writer Mark Haddon for his first adult novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Doubleday).

Haddon beat off strong competition from Man Booker winner DBC Pierre, shortlisted as winner of the Whitbread first novel category for Vernon God Little (Cannongate). The colorful Pierre was ousted early in the two-hour judging session, and Haddon's closest rival for the prize turned out to be Scottish poet Don Paterson and his T.S. Eliot prize-winning anthology Landing Light (Faber and Faber), which was singled out for special praise. The shortlist was completed by David Almond's children's book The Fire Eaters, a Smarties Gold Book Award winner in 2002; and D.J. Taylor's centenary biography of George Orwell, Orwell: The Life (Chatto and Windus).

The publishing history of Haddon's book is as unorthodox as the tale itself, which is a murder mystery told from the point of view of a 15-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome. As an author with 18 children's novels to his name, Haddon automatically offered the book to his editor David Fickling. Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape had also seen it and loved it; it was decided that Random House would publish both an adult and a young people's edition.

The crossover strategy has been successful for Random House; the book's combined hardback sales now total more than 150,000 copies in the U.K. Haddon has also won the Guardian children's fiction prize for his extraordinary, empathetic piece of writing.