Bibliofile

Writers over 40 are not very happy, especially Scottish novelist and physicist Andrew Crumey who was on the Granta list until they found out he was a year too old at 41. Crumey lashed out at the young-equals-best notion that prevails in the publishing world today. He railed at publishers who are "filling our bookshops with an endless succession of photogenic twentysomething debut novelists all of whom are billed as the Next Big Thing, and can be dropped if they fail to break through".

AT 41, Amit Chaudhuri was also too old to figure in the list. But he has won a literary prize he says means more to him than the half-dozen international awards he has received so far for his novels, including the Betty Trask Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and LA Times Book Prize. His A New World has won him his first Indian honour: the Sahitya Akademi Award for English.