For about a decade I have had the pleasant duty to serve on the prize-giving committee for a certain Italian literary award. Italy is the promised land for literary awards and all sorts of horse-trading and shenanigans go on to secure a worthy winner. In 1994 the town of Alassio, a delightful holiday destination in Liguria, came up with the idea of establishing a literary prize, whose distinguishing feature was, and still is, that the winner would be chosen by an international panel of judges, rather than a gaggle of local gossips. So it was that members of the jury were drawn up from the ranks of Italianists in various European universities, and who then sent their nominations to the secretary. And to nobody else. One year, one of the works under consideration was the novel of a certain author born in Liguria; the individual concerned held it to be entirely self-evident that by virtue of his background alone he couldn’t possibly not win. His work, in which marauding gorillas roamed the Ligurian woods leaping on unsuspecting women, didn’t really cut the mustard with me and consequently I gave it nul points. When the results of the competition were released, it transpired that if I had placed the gorillas even in third place it would have won the competition.

I was blissfully ignorant of this possibility until a couple of years had passed and I found myself reading the aforementioned gorilla fiction writer’s next novel. It featured a Ligurian writer who had had a literary prize snatched from under his nose. The cause of this miscarriage of justice was some dreadful harridan from Iceland (!), who couldn’t possible appreciate southern European sensuality. And in this way I too have made it into a work of fiction, albeit in a minor role, and heavily disguised as an Icelander.