The Unfinished Harauld Hughes

"Obviously, he is a brilliant writer and people will know him from TV comedy. This is maybe not necessarily what you would expect from Richard Ayoade, but it’s such a clever idea. It’s a spoof biography. In fact, one of the other judges said they found it in the biography section in a bookshop—a person in the bookshop clearly hadn’t worked out it was a parody. But it certainly is. The premise is that Richard Ayoade, the narrator, a version of the real Ayoade, is trying to write the biography of a late 20th-century writer, Harauld Hughes, who is clearly a cross between Ted Hughes and Harold Pinter, that type of literary icon. Someone has told the narrator, Richard Ayoade, that they look similar, so he starts trying to put together this biography. It’s a pitch-perfect parody of a particular time in English letters, and of the way that a certain type of man was lionised. He has such a good, clever line of spoofing that type of writing, the poetry and the incomprehensible plays of the second half of the 20th century. I don’t know if this has as broad an appeal as some of the other books, but the wordplay is incredibly clever. It does help if you know something about that literary scene. But he has such a good ear for comic language—this is a book that will make you laugh out loud. He’s really multi-talented. It’s not what I would have expected him to write, but there is a self-conscious cleverness that is a real pleasure to read. Definitely. It was a job to get from our unofficial longlist to the shortlist. There was a lot of argument in narrowing that down to the books we have here. There were other books some of us felt very passionately about. I think, in general, there’s an idea that comic writing is a poor cousin of literary writing, but this shortlist shows that, actually, you can do both. You can look at serious subject matter, tackle historical episodes, and also have fun with characters. These are books that will pull the reader in and get the reader to care about the outcome for the characters. It’s not just a series of jokes. These books show the potential and scope and range of comic writing in English. We’ve been very lucky this year. The winners of both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Vintage Bollinger Prize will be announced on 1st December. wodehouseprize.com"