Jarvis Cocker: Judging the Booker Prize Is 'Just Like Being in a Band'

Jarvis Cocker judged this year's Booker prize from airport lounges and hotel rooms, reading 163 eligible novels on an iPad while on tour with Pulp. The winner, chosen last Saturday, is The End of Everything by M John Harrison.

Writing about the experience, Cocker didn't reach for literary criticism first. He reached for the band analogy. "Judging the Booker prize is like being in a band," he said. "A band will often bring together a very disparate set of people, their only thing in common the fact they're in the same group. And a good band takes account of the interests and strengths of its members – that's how you get a unique sound."

Who sat on the panel?

The 2025 judging panel was chaired by the classicist Mary Beard and included the writers Patricia Lockwood, Raymond Antrobus and Rebecca Liu, alongside Cocker. Five very different people, one common cause, in his account: "to pick a good winner."

Cocker, never one to miss a dry aside about hierarchy, noted that both bands and Booker panels are "at least ostensibly, democracies (though in Pulp, I'm the singer, so I make more noise than everybody else)." He credits Beard with preventing the classic jury failure — settling on the least offensive option. "Mary didn't expect us to toe a party line," he wrote.

How did they pick the winner?

Walking into the final meeting, Cocker had three books he'd have been happy to see win, and no idea which would prevail. The panel "seesawed around quite a lot" before landing on Harrison's novel. His verdict on the deliberations: "no scones were thrown at each other in the process."

The panel agreed that The End of Everything "is not a particularly easy book to read" — but not because it's badly written. "It's actually very well written," Cocker said. "The author is telling us that the thing that has gone wrong with the world is something that no one can really understand." He argues the book is a culmination of a craft that, for too many readers, has flown under the radar.

What did the tour logistics look like?

The details are worth listing:

• 163 eligible novels, read largely on long flights
• An iPad instead of books, because he couldn't lug a massive bag on tour
• A judging session in Sydney running from 1am to 3am, thanks to the time difference
• Three full readings of the winning novel

The iPad had an unexpected benefit: anonymity. "I couldn't be put off by a rubbish cover," Cocker wrote, and he often didn't know the author's name, so "any conscious or unconscious prejudices that I may have had towards them disappeared." He wouldn't recommend the screen as a reading experience. He read anyway.

Re-reading changed the field. Some books deepened, revealing what he'd missed; others "shallowed out," having given everything on the first pass.

What did it do to him as a reader?

Cocker went in fearing the process would put him off reading, and feeling like "the odd one out on a panel of established writers and industry professionals." Instead he enjoyed it. He won't read 163 books in a year again, but he now finishes a book in three or four days — a pace he suspects may revert to his "usual tortoiselike" one. He has also discovered contemporary writers he plans to keep following.

His closing note doubles as advice for future judges: never having been in a book club before, he found that hearing readers "with different modes of life" discuss the same books was its own reward. "Anyone who's invited to be a Booker prize judge," he wrote, "is in for a treat."