Amis has never won Britain's most prestigious literary prize, the Booker, or indeed any since the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel, The Rachel Papers, more than 35 years ago. But he said: "I'm not a prizewinning kind of writer. I don't bring people together. Everyone likes my novel, Money, but the chairman of the Booker Prize that year nominated it as the worst novel. So that's how against the grain I tend to be."