Multiple matching

Multiple matching

Who Needs Literary Prizes?

Five people from the book world assess whether literary prizes help or harm fiction

You are going to read an article in which five people from the world of books discuss literary prizes. For questions 1-10, choose from the sections (A-E). The sections may be chosen more than once.

A

The winner: Isadora Quaye, novelist

I am, I suppose, the person least entitled to complain about literary prizes. Before my third novel won, it had sold a little under two thousand copies, and I had quietly applied for a full-time teaching post; another year of near-invisibility and I would have stopped writing altogether. The prize changed that overnight. Sales increased tenfold, translation rights went to twenty countries, and for the first time in my life I could pay the rent from fiction alone. What nobody warns you about is what happens next. For four years I could barely complete a paragraph of the following book. Every sentence seemed to be auditioning for an imaginary panel, and I would abandon perfectly serviceable chapters because they did not sound sufficiently like the work of a prize-winner. I do not say this to elicit sympathy. I say it because the public narrative of prizes, in which talent is identified and duly rewarded, bears little resemblance to my experience of one. Five capable people read a great many books and happened, that year, to agree on mine. Had a different judge been ill, or in a different mood, I would very probably be teaching sixth-formers now. I was lucky, and I try not to confuse luck with merit.

B

The bookseller: Eamon Cartwright

From behind a till, the effect of a major prize is simple to describe and slightly depressing to contemplate. The winning title, once it has a gold sticker on the cover, will sell more copies in a fortnight than most literary novels sell in their lifetime. The shortlisted books receive a modest lift that has usually evaporated by Christmas, and the longlisted ones might as well not have been mentioned. So whatever the organisers intend, prizes do not so much widen readers’ horizons as narrow them, concentrating attention, and therefore money, on one or two titles while the rest of the shelf gathers dust. What intrigues me is the nature of the demand. Every autumn, customers come in and ask for ‘the prize book’ without knowing its title, its author or what it is about. They are buying the verdict, not the novel, and I have watched people who would never otherwise read experimental fiction carry home some fearsomely difficult book with every sign of satisfaction. Whether they finish it is another matter. I am not complaining, exactly; that fortnight keeps us afloat. But I would be lying if I said it had much to do with the love of literature.

C

The judge: Professor Marguerite Sallis

I have judged two major fiction prizes, and I would ask those who scoff at them to try reading a hundred and fifty novels in four months while holding down a job. By the final weeks, I was reading late into the night with a kind of grim determination, and I cannot honestly claim that the books I encountered then received the same quality of attention as those I read in the first, fresher weeks. That is an uncomfortable admission, and I make it deliberately. The deliberations themselves are less dramatic than outsiders imagine. Five people with different tastes must arrive at one book, and the result is rarely the novel that any individual judge loved most. More often it is the one nobody could bring themselves to argue against: the book that survives because it gives no one grounds for strong objection. Even so, I would defend the process. A prize obliges its judges, and anyone who follows the debate, to articulate why one book matters more than another, and that act of articulation is rarer than it ought to be. Literary culture needs occasions on which people disagree in public about sentences.

D

The critic: Rupert Anstey

My objection to prizes is not that they choose the wrong books, though they frequently do, but that they reframe literature as a contest. Coverage of the shortlist borrows the vocabulary of the racecourse: favourites, outsiders, a dark horse. The books themselves are reduced to a line of description apiece, while the speculation about who will win fills columns. Worse, I am convinced that the prizes have begun to shape what is written. There is now a recognisable type of novel, ambitious in scope, earnest in theme and carefully balanced in its politics, that seems to have been engineered with a judging panel in mind. Writers deny this, of course, and I do not suppose many of them sit down intending to write a prize-winner; but one learns what is rewarded, and ambition bends accordingly. And yet I find it impossible to wish the prizes away entirely. For one evening a year, a novel appears on the front pages of newspapers that otherwise ignore fiction altogether, and serious writing is discussed on the evening news. Nothing else achieves that. If the price is a degree of vulgarity, I suspect it may be worth paying, however much the ceremony itself makes me wince.

E

The publisher: Folake Adeyinka, independent press

People who talk about prizes as if they were neutral should look closely at the small print. Most of the major awards charge an entry fee, limit the number of titles each publisher may submit, and require any publisher whose book reaches the shortlist to commit a substantial sum to marketing it. For a large house, these are trivial costs. For a press like mine, which employs three people and publishes eight books a year, they are a genuine deterrent, and for several years we simply did not enter. The playing field is not level, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. I say all this as someone whose press was rescued by a prize. Four years ago, against my better judgement, we entered a debut collection of linked stories, and it made the shortlist. The marketing commitment nearly broke us, but the orders that followed paid for two years of publishing, including several books that would never have found a larger home. So I am not ungrateful. I simply believe that the people who run these prizes have a responsibility to ask how many good books never reach the judges at all.

1. Which contributor admits that the circumstances in which a task was carried out may have affected the fairness of its outcome?

2. Which contributor argues that the conditions for taking part favour some competitors over others?

3. Which contributor suggests that recognition can make subsequent creative work more difficult?

4. Which contributor claims that prizes have influenced the kind of fiction being written in general?

5. Which contributor reveals that they had been close to giving up their profession?

6. Which contributor says that the financial benefits of a prize are concentrated on very few books?

7. Which contributor claims that the chosen book is often the one that provokes least opposition rather than the most enthusiasm?

8. Which contributor reluctantly accepts that prizes give fiction a public profile it would otherwise lack?

9. Which contributor observes that some purchasers value a book’s status more than its content?

10. Which contributor attributes their own success largely to chance?