2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award: The Longlist

• 10th Oct 2008 at 12:36:29 BST by Liam Doyle

Details of the 13 books to have been longlisted for the prestigious award.

The announcement of the longlist for the 2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award has been made. The books, listed alphabetically by author, are:

• Paul Canoville - Black and Blue
• John Carlin - Playing The Enemy
• Janie Hampton - The Austerity Olympics
• Rebecca Jenkins - The First London Olympics: 1908
• Richard Moore - Heroes, Villains and Velodromes
• Haruki Murakami - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
• Musa Okwonga - A Cultured Left Foot
• Rowan Simons - Bamboo Goalposts
• Ed Smith - What Sport Tells Us About Life
• Jackie Stewart - Winning is Not Enough
• Marcus Trescothick - Coming back to Me: The Autobiography
• Jeremy Whittle - Bad Blood
• Jonathan Wilson - Inverting the Pyramid

The longlist will be trimmed down to a shortlist of 6 titles which will be announced on Simon Mayo's radio show on Thursday 30th October. The winner will be announced on Monday 24th November.

I'm slightly surprised that The Last Amateurs and More Than A Game didn't make it (although I think More Than A Game was published just outside the qualifying date - why do publishers delay publication of a title that should be aiming for this award so that it's released a week after the closing date?) and I'm also surprised that A Cultured Left Foot and The First London Olympics did - they both seemed very ordinary books to me.

As to the more general question of whether a longlist is needed, I'm remain deeply sceptical. It apes the trend you see in other awards and I suppose it's designed to be generate additional interest. Whether you do that by promoting titles that shouldn't get anywhere near a shortlist seems dubious to me. Surely it'd be far better to concentrate on a really strong shortlist and get people talking about the good books rather than - like me - focusing on two books that you wouldn't expect to be selected?

We'll take a more detailed look at the shortlisted books once the announcement has been made.