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Nobody expected Penelope Fitzgerald to win the Booker Prize in 1979 for her novel Offshore.

Keneally was also on the short list, with Naipaul's Abend in the River, the clear frontrunner.

Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would skim out into the Pampas the candidates he considered non-starters.

Back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, a polite smile on his face.

I couldn't help enjoying the dinner Fitzgerald wrote to a friend shortly afterwards,

though the evening standard man told me frankly that they'd all written their pieces about

Nipal and felt they were free to get drunk.

Unlike the others on the short list, offshore was short, deep, highly crafted, about a colony of

misfits in London in the early 1960s, living on boats and with the certain failure that

kept causing them to sink back into the mud moorings of the Great Tideway.

Was this the reason for the pampas skimming that the book was so small and sad?

The author was quite old and unglomerous, as photos taken at the dinner attest.

Fitzgerald always struggled with what she called the Problem of Evening Dress,

and wore a long flowery cotton garment like a flannelette nighty.

Did that give licence to the next day's BBC book programme, opened by Robert Robinson,

on the proposition that the judges made the wrong choice? A favourite aunt, a jam-making

grandmother, putterish, distraite.

This is the sort of thing people wrote about the figure Fitzgerald presented,

finding a dissonance between the performance and the craft and brains of the books.

It's tricky enough dealing with these women writers,

but one who's old as well and didn't start publishing until she was nearly 60,

...