Lit Prizes: Hiding in Plain Sight

February 22 2010 — Guest post by Sam Cooney

A few days ago while waiting for a friend in Yarraville, west of Melbourne, I stepped into the Sun Theatre bookshop, enjoying the discovery of what is another remarkable local book retailer. Occupying prime real estate in the store was a delineated and substantial central section of the shelves crowned by a thick-fonted banner: ‘Prize Winners’. There I spotted Things We Didn’t See Coming, Breath, Look Who’s Morphing, The Boat and a handful of others. With their taped-on newspaper reviews and additional ‘Staff Pick’ star-shaped stickers, these official chosen ones shined and ruffled with pride.

This got me thinking about literary prizes (again), but this time I found myself wondering how come we know so little about the verdicts from some of our biggest (and smallest) awards. In this country it is customary for a prize announcement to be coupled with a slickly worded collective argument outlining the decision, but rarely are we given any clue as to how this judgment was reached.

If David Attenborough were to describe book prizes and literary awards as creatures, he would call probably label them fickle and furtive. They are an ubiquitous but also stealthy species, hiding in plain sight. With a strong aversion to being trapped or scrutinised, as well as being monitored from afar, they will close ranks when threatened.

Why the secrecy? Why the mystery, especially when literary prizes are something like the Michelin stars or Robert Ebert’s thumbs of the book industry?

Floating around for many years now has been a general belief that the Miles Franklin generates an average 2000 extra sales for the winning book. However, it is worth noting that literary prizes do not commonly change sales patterns (Louise Adler wrote in 2008 that 'few Miles Franklin award winners, for example, have enjoyed a fillip in sales').

That said, prizes can still exercise great influence. When Steven Conte won the 2008 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction for his novel The Zookeeper’s War, sales 'really rocketed off,' he said. 'In the three weeks after the awards were announced, I sold as many copies as I had in the whole preceding year.' Sleepers Publishing’s Louise Swinn has seen it first hand: 'the best way for us to make sales still seems to be things like winning awards, decent write-ups in reputable papers, and actual bookstores stocking the book so that people who want to go in and just buy something see it there and take a punt.'

Prize stickers and textual banners on book covers shout ‘buy me, for those in the know about literature say I’m the best!’ Ryan Paine likens them to 'decals on a racecar' – pictographics that attract the eye and show weighty cultural backing.

So if we accept that prizes can at best lead to better sales and at worst act as a stamp of respect and cultural kudos, how come we (and the media) are not asking for more transparency? For too long now, book judging panels have presented themselves as objective and neutral, when the absolute opposite is the case. It’s well worth reading Geordie Williamson, the preeminent media writer in Australia for all things literature, as he outlines his quandaries with judging panels in a recent article called ‘Writing to win’.

Louse Adler also smacks the nail on the head, hard:

Literary prizes are always the stuff of personal preferences; they are arbitrary, unfair and subjective. The judges bring partisanship, predilection and indigestion to their deliberations. Why pretend that literary judgements are anything more than a matter of individual taste, shaped by a knowledge of the literary culture, tempered by robust conversation with equally educated but idiosyncratic judges?”

And in an interview, novelist and sometime panellist Michael Meehan agreed:

The idea that the judges are involved in some kind of objective ‘rating’ of novels, though, as ‘first’, ‘second’ or ‘third’, is fatuous. I’ve been on judging panels and on the best of them we all agreed at the outset simply to put forward the books we ‘liked best’ - at a certain point, of course, we knew that we would have to give reasons – but each judge was free to put forward his or her own personal preferences on quite a subjective basis. Otherwise you can get into some pretty sterile formulas – which novel best embodies ‘national themes and current issues’, for example, or worse, which novels are ethically and ideologically the most ‘sound’? – and you’ll soon start slipping into the trap of judging , as a lot of critics and academics do, by what you think writers ’ought to be writing’, rather than looking at and assessing what they are actually producing.

So what now? One possibility is to have every judging panellist publish a short explanation of how they understood the process on their particular panel. In this they could outline whether they agree or disagree with the winning title/s, as well as sketching out the stages by which the verdict was reached.

However, there are two problems with this. Firstly, how difficult is it to fully explain a decision about literature, especially if the dreaded ‘gut feeling’ comes into play? Do we really want to force panellists to justify their opinions, and then perhaps question their motives? And secondly, if we allow some or total transparency of literary judging panels, will this result in even more authors writing with awards in mind?

Whatever the case, it is time to open the can and shake out the worms.

-Sam Cooney blogs at Not Dark Yet.