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Awards Split

Chris Flynn July 31

It’s pretty much the halfway point in literary awards season—the Australian Book Industry Awards, the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the Orange Prize, the Barbara Jefferis, the Miles Franklin, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the Kibble and the Dobbie are now all behind us, with the Age Book of the Year, the MAN Booker, the Victorian Premier’s, the Queensland Literary Awards, the New South Wales and Western Australian Premier’s Awards still to come.

In terms of fiction, every prize awarded so far has been won by a woman. Yes, several of the prizes are specifically for books written by women but still, it wouldn’t be that great of a surprise to see all the remaining awards go to the likes of Anna Funder, Gillian Mears and Kate Grenville. Which makes a rather pleasant change from the litany of male winners we’ve had in recent years. In fact, given the extraordinary number of superb books written by women in 2012, it’s tough to see any men winning next year either. Has there been a seachange in attitudes? A freshening of judging panels? Has a natural balance been restored? None of the above, in all likelihood. The best writers of fiction at the moment just happen to be women. Game over, man, game over.

foals-bread

Foal’s Bread would have narrowly missed out to All That I Am on some of the early 2012 awards but picking up an $80,000 winner’s cheque from the Prime Minister has gone some way to redressing the balance. I would expect Gillian Mears to pick up at least one other major award for the book. The $30,000 Kibble just went to Gail Jones for Five Bells, with Favel Parrett picking up the Dobbie for Past the Shallows, a popular debut novel that has appeared on just about every shortlist this year. Given the shortlists for The Age Book of the Year and the Victorian Premier’s Awards should be out very soon indeed, it will be fascinating to see if the same books appear. The difference with a lot of the awards from this point on, starting with those two, is that they are judged on books published between June 2011 and May 2012, rather than on those that came out between January and December 2011. Thus, a whole new raft of titles from the first half of this year are eligible, notably from authors such as Carrie Tiffany, Deborah Robertson, Peter Carey, Kirsten Tranter, Paddy O’Reilly, Patrick White, Drusilla Modjeska and a slew of others.

It’s getting to the point with these prizes that I wonder how judges can pick a winner at all. Unless something truly extraordinary blows everything else away, I think it’s fair to say that there are so many books of high quality being written now that it’s virtually impossible to single one title out as being ‘better’ than all the rest. Wouldn’t it be lovely, and a lot more sensible and equitable, to split your fifty or eighty or a hundred grand prize money between the shortlisted authors as reward for having produced the outstanding five or six titles of the year? Ten or twenty thousand bucks goes a long way for most writers and it would make the judging process a hell of a lot easier. When faced with deciding which book is the more deserving winner—Foal’s Bread or All That I Am or Blood or The Cook or Past the Shallows, to take a few examples—how do you separate them when most readers would agree that all are uniformly excellent?



 

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