---
title: The Reading and Writing Room- What the Judges Are Reading
description: A glimpse inside the rooms where the great book prizes are decided, and what the people selecting the next Booker Prize or Pulitzer winner are actually looki...
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-06-16T11:00:00.000Z
updated: 2026-06-29T08:44:00.739Z
canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/the-reading-and-writing-room-what-the-judges-are-reading
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/55284534471_1466c707e8_c.jpg
categories: Authors & Writers
content_type: Guide
publication: Rich Books
access: members
schema_type: Article
---

Somewhere this year, a writer you have never heard of started reading at six in the morning and did not stop. He read while he ate. He read in queues, at bus stops, in cafes, in a chair in the corner of his kitchen. He read, once, at the back of a church during a funeral. This is not a portrait of obsession. It is a job description. Roddy Doyle, who won the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, chaired its judging panel in 2025, and that is how he described the work of getting through the year's fiction. The panel he led read more than one hundred and fifty novels in seven months. They needed to finish roughly a book every day and a half. Sarah Jessica Parker, one of his fellow judges, called the process real agony.

We are forever told to write the book the prizes want. Almost no one tells us what that book looks like from the other side of the table. So this is an attempt to sit in the chair, to watch the readers read, and to learn what moves them when they finally agree on a single name. There is no formula here, and any writer who tells you there is one is selling something. But there are patterns, and the patterns are worth knowing.

### The room only very few will ever enter

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