It has taken 30 years, though, for shared spoils to occur in the William Hill sports book of the year, with the un-splittable 2018 decision between Paul Gibson's The Lost Soul of Eamonn Magee, a biography of a troubled Ulster boxer, and A Boy in the Water, Tom Gregory's memoir of swimming the Channel at the age of 11 in 1988, the youngest person to have done so.
The consequence of this judging deadlock is that the winning writers divide the £30,000 prize. And anyone who bet on either book winning will – under dead-heat racing rules – lose half their stake money and have the other half paid as a winner at the starting price. That said, the William Hill prize doesn't really have a betting market. The sponsors don't run one because of fears that they would be accused of pressuring the judges to select short-odds favourites, and other turf accountants would likely be reluctant to promote a rival's trophy.
However, any punter who had studied form could have had a clue to what might happen with this year's prize. One of the judges had previously been part of another panel that refused at the final fence. It was me, having also served on the Man Booker jury that proved unable in 1992 to decide between Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger.
On that occasion, we were criticised for judicial weakness and accused – ironically, given what has now happened with the William Hill – of applying to literature a scientific inseparability that exists only in sports that are timed by the clock.
Prize-giving panels usually have an uneven number of jurors to prevent this happening. But on the William Hill, one judge was unable to take part in the final meeting, and, on the Booker, a colleague who loved both finalists equally felt unable to make the casting vote, although live TV coverage of the ceremony had already begun.
Even with even-numbered panels, a draw will only happen when half the arbiters are not only passionately committed to their own choice but would be horrified if the other lot's favourite came home.
Ondaatje v Unsworth 26 years ago became a standoff between experimental and traditional storytelling; Gibson v Gregory was a similarly oppositional clash between provocative biography and uplifting autobiography. Although what happens in the jury room mainly should stay there, some judges had, from a shortlist of seven, Gregory as their favourite and Gibson as their least, or vice versa. As in Brexit, which all human actions perhaps now reflect, compromise is only possible if there is some shared ground.
Because I am the only factor common to the Booker '92 and William Hill '18 decisions, some may blame me. Certainly, some of my family have suggested that an alleged stubbornness may have played a part. However, on both occasions, it was me who first asked whether a long standoff could be resolved by sharing the prize.
Twice, the only alternative outcome would have been for both factions to peel off on to a third book, which nobody really liked. I've judged dozens of book prizes, and such results are depressingly common. Twice, in order to prevent another judge's threat to resign, I compromised by voting for books that were far from my favourite, and still regret it.
It's true that literary preference is subjective – whereas athletes and horses can be ranked by fancy watches – but sometimes a dead heat is the right result of a book prize, at least ensuring that the winners have, between them, unanimous backing.
