Tracey Emin paints ugly picture of Turner prize as flawed and unjust

On the eve of the announcement of this year's winner of the Turner prize, the UK's most controversial art award, the artist Tracey Emin has launched a bitter attack on the judging process, claiming it was fatally flawed by compromise voting and favouritism.

The judging panel, which is chaired by the Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota, narrowly failed to select Emin to win the £20,000 prize in 1999 with her much-criticised exhibit My Bed. "The Turner prize is unfair," she said. "I used to believe that any of the artists considered for it genuinely had a fair chance of winning. I believed it was done by democratic vote, and that anyone could win. The artists who are nominated believe it, the public believes it, but it's not true.

"The four judges nominate four people who they want to win. Then one judge says, 'I'm not having Jake and Dinos Chapman – over my dead body'. The second one replies, 'In that case, you can't have So-and-so', and you end up with a watered-down list of artists; they're not the artists who the judges wanted.

"It's never the people who deserve to get nominated [who get through to the shortlist]. And compromise candidates never win. It doesn't matter how brilliant their show might be, or what they've done for British art, they're never going to get the prize because no one actually wanted them on the list; they were put there as a compromise candidate".

Emin went on: "I think that's what happened to me when I was shortlisted in 1999, because none of the judges for that year's prize had had any association with me.

"All the judges had worked one-to-one with each of the other artists. But I didn't know any of the judges".