Book words

Katie Price, aka Jordan, has been shortlisted for the WH Smith Children's Book of the Year award for her book Perfect Ponies: My Pony Care Book. The problem (if there is one) is that Price isn't, in the full sense of what we usually mean by this, the author. She is assisted by Rebecca Farnworth:

She says she is closely involved in her novels. "I talk in a tape and say the stories that I want. Rebecca then writes each chapter. It comes back, and I read it through."

[Claire] Powell clarifies. "Then Kate re-sits down with it and says, I want it to be this or that, or more powerful, and they just write it into book words."

Some people are now upset about this - upset that a ghost-written book should have been shortlisted for a prize. But Michael Rosen has come to Price's defence:

[He] said that Roald Dahl was a rarity among children's writers in producing books that were purely his own work. "We get too hung up about authorship. None of us writes a book entirely on our own. We get help from editors, or ideas might come from conversations with our families, or children. The issue is whether the book's good, not who has written it. If Jordan or any of her helpers have written a very good book then absolutely good luck to them."

Rosen has a point, but he supports it with a lousy argument. If the prize is a book-prize, there is no reason why a ghost-written book shouldn't be eligible for it. It's the quality of what's in it that counts. On the other hand, Rosen is at once maligning the generality of children's writers and treating the truth that most writers benefit from the help, influence and suggestions of others as if it wipes out the distinction between writing something oneself and having it ghost-written, or plagiarizing it, or claiming authorship for the writing of someone else.

The issue in prize-giving is whether a book is good. But in the normal meaning of words, most writers write their own books.