Katie Price: England's biggest selling novelist

I discovered the other day that Katie Price is Britain’s best selling novelist. Katie, aka Jordan, is a glamour model whose assets floated her to prominence. Her novels and memoirs (is 3 at 30 too many?) are interchangeable; all feature the misadventures of a misunderstood beauty, whose only goals in life are to find love and strip off for a tabloid newspaper. Among her literary achievements, she may be credited with enriching our vocabularies: “dickalicious” is the word she, or possibly her ghost-writer, invents to describe her husband’s penis.

I hope you’re feeling smug over there; you should be. Quite how the British slipped into such idiocy is another story but the sad truth is that this year’s Booker Prize winner, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, had sold fewer than 3,000 copies before the announcement, while 126,000 of Ms Price’s novel Angel Uncovered have flown off the shelves since publication in June this year. Similar statistics are recycled every year around Booker time, when people who should know better defend the public desire for semi-pornographic reading matter by intellectual dwarves. Did the judges have to join in this year? Louise Doughty provoked a storm when she laid into male academics who choose reputation over readability the day that the prize was announced. But surely part of the point of The Booker is that it brings literary novels to those who might otherwise miss them? I’m delighted to tell you that following Adiga’s win, The White Tiger is at No. 3 on Amazon UK this week, comfortably beating Ms Price, who’s sunk to 253.