Must all have prizes?
As the judges for the 2009 Booker prize are announced, it’s time, once again, to ponder the merits of the swelling class of event to which it belongs—the modern literary award. Which is exactly what I’ve been doing in an essay for our latest edition. I’m fascinated by the whole notion and culture of the literary prize (indeed, much of the inspiration for my own career began with winning a few local competitions; and I’m one of the judges of the VS Pritchett prize for short stories this year, the winner of which will be published by Prospect). Like most of the authors and publishers I spoke to during my research, though, I’m also thoroughly ambivalent about its role in the world of books; and about what this role suggests for the future of literature in print.
If, on the grand scale, literature is about enduring excellence, there can seem something at best rather arbitrary and at worst downright self-serving about the business of prize-givings. As James Wood rather magnificently put it, looking back on his own stint as a Booker judge:
…prizes have become a form of reviewing: it is prize-lists that select what people read, prize-lists that make literary careers. Bookshops order novels based on the prizes they have won or been shortlisted for. Nowadays, a whole month before the shortlist is announced, scores of novelists are effectively told that their books have not been the “big books” of the year, because they are not to be found on the longlist. Soon, no doubt, we will have the long-longlist, and the long-long longlist. Some wonderful books win the Booker, of course, just as the flypaper occasionally catches some really large flies. But it means – or should mean – nothing in literary terms.
Which neatly summarises most of the problems with contemporary prize culture. And yet—it also summarises the critical and commercial landscape within which books are now being published (or not) and read (or not). And if prizes are a flawed concept, they’re also as old an institution as written literature itself, and one that currently sustains much of the best that’s out there; not to mention, on a more modest level, many young or marginal authors for whom writing is a deeply uncertain career. Great literature may speak for itself. But it needs to be written to be read; and not all would-be writers are able to eke out their days indefinitely in garrets.
Gone, largely, are the days when adventurous editors took on a spate of new authors and novels each year, with an eye to nurturing talent that might eventually find an audience. Gone, too, are many of the lower-levels of a literary culture that once nourished new writers and readers: the smaller magazines, the anthologies, the idiosyncratic local newspapers and journals. In their place, of course, we have the internet: a vast new landscape of words with which literature has yet to negotiate any comfortable relationship. But for old-fashioned words on a page, as they have existed this last few hundred years, this freedom is a cold comfort; and literary prizes of all types now offer one of the few truly open channels between those outside the world of books / magazines and its products.
Print culture may be sick, but for the time being it remains the medium within which quality literature and the literary canon exist. And if prizes have become its lifeblood, in however compromised a manner, we should think very carefully about their gifts and their dangers—and how, at their best, they can keep vigorous that ancient, vital process by which written words slowly become part of the public, shared edifice of literature.
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Tom,
I am a good writer. First published at age four, the odd prize, scores of columns, even blogged professionally (which is by far the biggest accomplishment: easily there is one blogger making a living at it for every _million_ giving it away). Whether or not I am great, I am good enough. I workshopped my query letter intensively and have been submitting for over six months. So I am sick and crazy over the response I keep getting to my first novel:
“Looks good. Don’t know where to place it.”
(Average turnaround online: 1-2 weeks. John Kennedy O’Toole killed himself over fewer refusals.)
It is time for me to start writing another book. The new book has begun to harrass me. But I have had rheumatic issues since I was a child (where, in solitude, my imagination got heavy daily workouts) and am on a very small disability stipend. I write because it is the only thing I can do, and my only skill is being rejected. I am sick, cold, tired, aching, improperly fed, almost comically lonely. Why should I write another book nobody’ll read? But what else can I do? Write more poems? I don’t even _try_ to publish my poems.
Obviously, Tom, it is not you I am angry with.
Regards,
CD
Literary prizes are florishing today because of market economy.Is genius writer write with his blood for prizes? Awarding literary prizes can anybody write classics just like Maha Bharata or Don Quixote?
Tom Chatfield writes that in 1955 “the American science fiction magazine Amazing Stories began giving out an annual award.” Not quite. The Science Fiction Achievement Award (known as the
“Hugo Award”) was given in 1953, and then every year since 1955, but it is awarded by the annual World Science Fiction Convention. Amazing Stories had nothing to do with it.
Quite right, Gregory – the confusion here is the result of some severe editorial trimming of a longer passage – the awards were given as a one-off in 1953, but began as an annual tradition in 1955 – they are named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, but as you say the magazine didn’t found them – the point I was interested in, which got rather lost, is that they were not initially intended as a permanent Worldcon feature; but at the 13th Worldcon (in Ohio in 1955) it was decided to make the physical awards permanent and annual – hence my interest in 1955!
I think book prizes should be run like courtroom reality television shows. A representative for each author should argue the case for their author in front of a critical panel of judges while the authors are subject to examinations, reexaminations, and the unforgiving certainty of literary evidence. A verdict should be passed, the winner exalted, the losers flogged, the blood, the crowds, and the culling of cultural excellence, embraced. We are not whores but gladiators all!
The problem comes when a contest moves away from prize=the best. When there are so many other factors at play. And isn’t all writing subjective? How and what determines the best?
Prize of Literary is very lovely. In this way the new student of art are interest in this work.
Tom, this is a very good piece but as always doesn’t push far enough.
I have a double vision, both as someone who has judged a number of literary prizes, and as a literary novelist who has to date not made it to the long-list of any significant awards.
As a judge, I have been horrified by a number of things. Firstly, on every panel there is always at least one judge who has simply not read all the books submitted. By this I mean that they haven’t even read the first 50 pages (it’s generally accepeted that if after 50 pages a novel is really not working for a judge, they can skim the rest.) Yes, pay peanuts and get monkeys, but if you accept a request to judge you should do so responsibly, in the knowledge that what you decide has huge effects on an author’s future.
Secondly, many very fine novels are not submitted for the major prizes, so never get a chance. Unless a book has universal in-house support from the publisher and a full hand of 5-star reviews, forget it. Yet many good or great books are highly controversial. I’ve often called in overlooked books as a judge, but I’m afraid I have been a lone voice.
As a novelist, not winning makes it increasingly hard to keep up the confidence and determination to write. Most, especially women, don’t for obvious biological reasons hit their stride until their late 40s or 50s, after a long apprenticeship. But publishers and prize committees (it would appear) prefer the young and lissome. I was very struck by this when Zadie Smith won the Orange Prize for On Beauty, and Hilary Mantel didn’t for Beyond Black? Which is truly the better book? True as Lindsay Price says, prize doesn’t necessarily = better book. But the public thinks it does, and many publishers do too. So the supplementary question is, Are we really producing better fiction now than in pre-prize days?
[...] art Tom Chatfield Tom Chatfield is Prospect’s arts and books editor Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog It is a central paradox of writing that true greatness only becomes [...]
“We should restore proper expertise to juries”
Interesting point that requires expansion.
Nigel,
(with apologies for not yet addressing many of the very interesting other points that have been raised here).
“Proper expertise” is probably too vague a phrase. What I mean is people who have serious book credentials, whether as writers, critics, educators, editors, publishers, etc — people who know and care about books and writing, with a significant body of work to their names, whose presence on a jury gives its verdict a real claim to be of lasting interest. The Booker has historically been rather good at this – John Gross, Saul Bellow, John Fowles in 1971; Karl Miller, Edna O’Brien, Mary McCarthy in 1973.
Juries don’t have to be stuffy or mainstream. But I don’t think it helps prizes in the long run to have popular or celeb-heavy panels, or too many politicians, journalists, actors, etc. There are plenty of lively, serious thinkers in and around literature, and it’s their presence in and around literary prizes that’s likely to stimulate the best results within the limitations I talk about in the essay; and that won’t lead to a game of diminishing returns, whereby everyone tries to grab a bigger headline than everyone else by dragging in a star juror with a famous name but little knowledge of or passion for books. In the long run, this just makes literature itself look feeble (and prize-givers cynical, desperate, or both).