Not the Booker prize 2014: Simon Sylvester wins with The Visitors – video

Well that was fun! But I’ll save my analysis for later. I know how annoying it is to have to wade through a lot of jaw-jaw before an important announcement. Let’s just get down to it.

The winner of the Not the Booker Prize 2014 is: Simon Sylvester’s The Visitors.

Throughout this competition, The Visitors has had fervent support. Dozens, if not hundreds of people have spoken about how much they enjoyed this book and how much it moved them. It’s been a very impressive showing. This commitment was replicated in the public vote, where the Visitors blasted most of the opposition out of the water. Most, that is, but not all.

As usual, the voting was frenetic, delightful and confusing. Among the hundreds of passionate tributes to the books on our shortlist there were also dozens of voters who hadn’t quite grappled with our requests and strictures about writing capsule reviews for each book. All that made knowing how to count a complicated business. In the final reckoning, Tony Black’s The Last Tiger got slightly more votes (a mighty 130 to a pretty impressive 111). However, if we went along with the letter of the law and only counted reviews with a decent word count, things came out roughly 88 to 82 in The Visitors’ favour. Since it was so close, and since you the public are allotted two votes in our complicated voting system, we decided to split them down the middle. Meaning that both Tony Black and Simon Sylvester took a vote each into the judging round.

You can see how that judging went here:

To summarise: our judges notched one vote for Mahesh Rao’s excellent The Smoke Is Rising and two for Simon Sylvester. The Last Tiger was liked and admired – but crucially two of our judges were sure that The Visitors was more impressive atmospherically and worked better as a complete, polished novel.

And that was that. I’m sure the maths experts have already worked out that The Last Tiger took one vote, The Smoke Is Rising one vote, and The Visitors three, leaving us with a clear and very worthy winner. Donna Tartt didn’t even get a look-in – although I imagine she’ll manage just fine without us.

So there you have it. An excellent year, I’d say. There were at least four books on the shortlist that I was very pleased to read. Time will tell if their authors go on to such lofty heights as past Not the Booker contenders like Lars Iyer, Lee Rourke, and Benjamin Myers, but at this stage I’m feeling happy. I’d also say that this year was possibly the smoothest, least fractious and most amicable we’ve had so far.

That’s not to say that there hasn’t been controversy and excitement. The supporters of Louis Armand and Cairo provided a storm all of their own which added some salt to the stew. They made things more entertaining for everyone and I’m grateful. My review of First Time Solo was also strongly rejected by a number of commenters who put forward excellent and bracing arguments about how we should assess a book’s quality. The discussion has been vigorous and strong, in other words, which is just the way we like it.

I’m also feeling good about the voting system. It went astonishingly smoothly, give or take a little confusion about what should and shouldn’t count. I think we now have a system we can take into next year without too much tinkering. Although, of course, we reserve the right to add a little bit of chaos to the equation. I’m looking forward to it already! Once I’ve had a nice rest, anyway ...