(At the judging session in early August, "people were whispering 'You're gonna win,' " Casey Pugh said).
She said the final judging session quickly came down to two books, the second of which she discreetly declined to name.
This brings us to a point that keeps coming up in our chat after the judging session: the exclusivity of games; their esoteric nature.
The final judging session was uncontroversial - all but one of us were unequivocally in favour of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.
After a judging session described as "truly contentious", it was joined on the shortlist by five other titles, with subjects including autism, the digital age and Guantánamo Bay.
May We Be Forgiven was named winner of a competition now in its 18th year after a judging session that lasted nearly four hours.
This meant that the final judging session lasted a bare 10 minutes, after which I had to sit discussing the existence (or non-existence) of God with AC Grayling, a subject on which both of us hold strong views.
We were somewhat exercised by the question of whether Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot was really a novel, while in the final judging session Anthony Curtis continued to argue for David Lodge (Small World), and Ted Rowlands stuck out for the Ballard.
A few years ago, during the shooting of the first season of "Project Runway," Tim Gunn, a regular on the show, attended a judging session for one of the design competitions.
After an "emotionally draining" and closely fought final judging session, Aravind Adiga, one of the two debut novelists on the Man Booker shortlist, was last night awarded the £50,000 prize for The White Tiger, a bracingly modern novel about the dark side of the new India.
