The awarding of the GPA Award was mired by controversy. Graham Greene was part of the jury, though it was not noticed by the award organisers that he had included a clause in his contract that allowed him to overrule the decision of the other jury members. Consequently, when the jury chose "The Book of Evidence" as the winner, Greene chose to ignore this and picked "The Broken Commandment" by Vincent McDonnell as the winner. Eventually through the intervention of Tony Ryan a compromise was reached whereby Banville was awarded the £50,000 main prize while Guinness Peat Aviation provided an additional sum of £25,000 to be awarded to Vincent McDonnell, as a specially created "GPA First Fiction Award". Banville later described the incident as "grubby" and said that Greene had behaved quite badly in the awarding of the prize.