How we plan to cover the Booker Prize news amid a very busy month on the culture desk

If April is the cruellest month, then October is perhaps the busiest – at least in the arts world. From the London Film Festival to the usual spate of major new plays and TV dramas, there’s precious little respite for a culture journalist around this time of year. Next week we'll be covering the announcement of the winner of the Booker Prize, an award that has been the subject of much discussion on our desk since the shortlist was revealed on 20 September.

I was convinced Sally Rooney's Normal People would be a shoo-in; so, too, were the bookies, with whom she was the 3-1 favourite. And for good reason: with her follow-up to Conversations with Friends, the 27-year-old found beauty in its sparseness, deftly tracing the vicissitudes of a charged, unconventional relationship. In our five-star review, our critic Catherine Humble wrote: “Where Conversations... gets under your skin, this hits you deep in the marrow, and the result is quite astonishing.”

And yet somehow it didn't make the cut, which Holly Baxter lamented in a terrific article on the day the shortlist was announced.

The new favourite, according to William Hill, is Richard Powers's The Overstory, a potent and ambitious tale about climate apocalypse, filled with perfectly turned bon mots. Personally, though, I’d like to see Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room – about life behind bars at a women’s prison – take home the world's most pre-eminent literary prize. It’s an honest-feeling, boundary-pushing tale with a lot to say about modern politics that doesn’t have to make its characters sympathetic in order to make you feel for them.

In terms of covering the winner of the prize, our reporter Jack Shepherd will be our man on the ground, reporting on the announcement from Guildhall at 10pm. The brilliant writer (and novelist) Daisy Buchanan will await his call and then get going with a “first take” reaction shortly afterwards, discussing on our pages whether she thinks it was the right decision, or one perhaps as egregious as Normal People’s omission. It’s events like this that make arts journalism such an exciting beat to cover.

Yours,

Patrick Smith

Culture editor