Books and Bookers
What is the greatest prize in writing? Obviously, it’s making enough money from selling your writing to enable you to do a couple of hours scribbling in the morning and then slope off for lunch and legitimately describe everything that happens after that as ‘research’.
There are other, more formal examples such as the Nobel prize for literature, the Golden Dagger award for mystery writing, the Daily Mail Letter of the Day for the most Frothingly Insane Rant About Gypsies, the Orange prize for jolly well having a bash at trying to be as good a writer as a chap and, the daddy of them all, the Booker!
The Booker prize has traditionally fulfilled two functions, first it tells the sort of people who only read one book a year what book to read this year, and second, because it’s televised, it confirms everyone’s prejudices about the publishing industry, that it’s full of people who talk too much and only stop talking when they are drinking.
Publishing is changing. You no longer have to have your manuscript rejected by hundreds of publishers to feel belittled and crushed. On-line publishing means that you can make your writing available for free and you can feel belittled and crushed directly by the public, cutting out the middleman and moving straight to ‘bitter’ without ever having passed ‘success’. Of course, anyone truly unsuccessfully dedicated to their art will describe their writing as ‘difficult’ and themselves and ‘misunderstood’. These people can often be seen smoking furiously and, in their weaker moments, wondering if they should just sell out and write something commercial that involves handcuffs and things being pushed up people’s bottoms – so that’s either erotic fiction or crime writing then.
It’s good to see that travel writing and biography have their own prizes and that writers of non-fiction get recognition, especially when the book recognised is not, for instance, written by a comedian taking a ‘sideways’ look at the people of Mongolia – the only time a writer should take a sideways look at anything is when they are stretched out on the pub carpet.
But perhaps prizes for fiction writing are, to a certain extent, unnecessary. The measure of a success of any book is going to be the amount it sells. The measure of the popularity of any book is going to be the numbers it sells week on week and the measure of the worth of any book is surely if people are reading it years from now.
What prizes for fiction allow is a panel of judges to have the opportunity to advise us that the corking novel that we really enjoyed, enthralled us, kept us up nights and transported us more effectively than that economy class flight it made bearable, the same novel we recommended to all out friends and bought for family members was, in fact, too shit to even make this year’s longlist and what we should have been reading was the one about the depressed piano tuner with the difficult relationship with his mother and which does not have a happy ending at all and is very, very unlikely to ever be made into a film as the scene with the lobsters will never get past the censors.
How great then, to see Hilary Mantel win the Booker Prize this year, winning it for the second time, for the second book in a trilogy, which just like the first is a bestseller. The sheer bloody balls it must have taken the judges to go with a populist choice that is already on the Ikea coffee tables of many people, that is popular with readers, and that in paperback form will be a pleasingly hefty beach read when on holiday and handy for twatting mosquitoes.
Prizes shouldn’t matter, but as long as we have them, who they are given to does. The reality is that awards will always be with us, from the best in breed in the fat pigs class at the local agricultural show to the Golden Thingie award for best actor.
And really, who of us can truthfully say that offered a rosette and a ten quid book token, we’d turn it down?
There are other, more formal examples such as the Nobel prize for literature, the Golden Dagger award for mystery writing, the Daily Mail Letter of the Day for the most Frothingly Insane Rant About Gypsies, the Orange prize for jolly well having a bash at trying to be as good a writer as a chap and, the daddy of them all, the Booker!
The Booker prize has traditionally fulfilled two functions, first it tells the sort of people who only read one book a year what book to read this year, and second, because it’s televised, it confirms everyone’s prejudices about the publishing industry, that it’s full of people who talk too much and only stop talking when they are drinking.
Publishing is changing. You no longer have to have your manuscript rejected by hundreds of publishers to feel belittled and crushed. On-line publishing means that you can make your writing available for free and you can feel belittled and crushed directly by the public, cutting out the middleman and moving straight to ‘bitter’ without ever having passed ‘success’. Of course, anyone truly unsuccessfully dedicated to their art will describe their writing as ‘difficult’ and themselves and ‘misunderstood’. These people can often be seen smoking furiously and, in their weaker moments, wondering if they should just sell out and write something commercial that involves handcuffs and things being pushed up people’s bottoms – so that’s either erotic fiction or crime writing then.
It’s good to see that travel writing and biography have their own prizes and that writers of non-fiction get recognition, especially when the book recognised is not, for instance, written by a comedian taking a ‘sideways’ look at the people of Mongolia – the only time a writer should take a sideways look at anything is when they are stretched out on the pub carpet.
But perhaps prizes for fiction writing are, to a certain extent, unnecessary. The measure of a success of any book is going to be the amount it sells. The measure of the popularity of any book is going to be the numbers it sells week on week and the measure of the worth of any book is surely if people are reading it years from now.
What prizes for fiction allow is a panel of judges to have the opportunity to advise us that the corking novel that we really enjoyed, enthralled us, kept us up nights and transported us more effectively than that economy class flight it made bearable, the same novel we recommended to all out friends and bought for family members was, in fact, too shit to even make this year’s longlist and what we should have been reading was the one about the depressed piano tuner with the difficult relationship with his mother and which does not have a happy ending at all and is very, very unlikely to ever be made into a film as the scene with the lobsters will never get past the censors.
How great then, to see Hilary Mantel win the Booker Prize this year, winning it for the second time, for the second book in a trilogy, which just like the first is a bestseller. The sheer bloody balls it must have taken the judges to go with a populist choice that is already on the Ikea coffee tables of many people, that is popular with readers, and that in paperback form will be a pleasingly hefty beach read when on holiday and handy for twatting mosquitoes.
Prizes shouldn’t matter, but as long as we have them, who they are given to does. The reality is that awards will always be with us, from the best in breed in the fat pigs class at the local agricultural show to the Golden Thingie award for best actor.
And really, who of us can truthfully say that offered a rosette and a ten quid book token, we’d turn it down?
Labels: Awards, Book, Hilary Mantel, Prizes, Publishing
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