The announcement of the Costa (formerly Whitbread) shortlists last week has, inevitably, marked the return of that chewy old question, "what are literary prizes for?"
I should immediately declare an interest: I've been a Whitbread judge and am currently an Orange judge. As an author, I've won a literary prize when I didn't think I stood a chance, and not won when I secretly thought that I had. So, you can see it's a subject I've thought rather a lot about.
The first thing to say about prizes is that they are, above all, a mechanism for generating publicity. It would cost companies like Costa or Orange millions in advertising to garner the same amount of name-checking; writers, meanwhile, benefit from the publicity their books get when they're in the running. So far, so good. But what, you might ask, does any of this have to do with literary quality - with making sure that the best books published each year get recognised?
Well the truth is literary prizes are a very blunt instrument. Judges will never get it "right" because there is no such thing as an objective judgment about which book is "best". All one can hope for, really, is that in the process of drawing up the long- and shortlists the judges will have scooped up a goodish proportion of goodish books out of which they pick a winner which is, well, goodish.
A different set of judges would, in each case, produce a different result. That isn't to suggest, however, that the people who get to sit on judging panels are a sloppy crew who don't read the books and don't really care about who wins. Nor, contrary to popular opinion, do they big up their friends and secretly connive to keep their enemies off the shortlists - or not in my experience, at least. In every literary competition I've judged, I've been consistently impressed at the seriousness with which everyone undertook their duties. If anyone had an interest - a friendship with an author, a marriage to the publisher - they immediately declared it. No one gossiped about the private lives of the authors whose books were now arrayed before us, even though it may have been mighty tempting. People argued passionately for the book they wanted to win, and listened thoughtfully when someone had another view. It was quite clear that many judges fretted and even lost sleep over whether they had reached the right decision.
Nonetheless, I don't for a minute think that winning a literary prize means a book is objectively better than its rivals. All it means is that on a certain day at a certain time in some anonymous meeting room or other, five well-meaning people reached an agreement that this or that book was really rather good. This isn't much comfort for the runners-up, and even less so for those who didn't make it to the longlist. But until we can come up with another way of judging literary merit, it's probably the best we can do.
