When writers win major awards the pages of the press are filled with laudatory articles which all seem to stem from the same model. We get the jury’s statement citing their justification for the decision; then comes the recipient’s reaction, which takes the form of either an off-the-cuff sound-bite (an honour, I’m humbled, when I heard the news I thought it had to be a mistake) or a choice chunk from an acceptance speech; which then gives way to a career retrospective—the writer’s life story mixed with literary highs and lows and sprinkled with the journalist’s evaluation of both the…