Bibliofemme: Features

What's going on with Book(er) Prizes?

Hugh Grant Whitbread Judge

The Whitbread Prize, one of the bastions of book award, will be announced later this month. The decision on who gets to pick the winner will be chosen, as we all know, from an esteemed panel culled from a pool of qualified literati. Except that this year, one of the judges is Hugh Grant. Now I'm not casting aspersions on Hugh's bookishness and I won't demand to see his library or ask if he's read any James Joyce (ironically a writer who never won a literary award in his lifetime). But Hugh Grant on the panel of one of the biggest book awards in the English Language can only mean one thing. No domain is safe from the realm of celebrity. The literary prize has been dumbed down for a generation who are happy enough to watch the awards' ceremony on television - or the TV adaptation of a winning work - but can't actually be bothered to read the book itself. If this was even a first indiscretion, it could be forgiven, but the Whitbread Prize came under fire five years ago when Jerry Hall, model and ex-wife of Mick Jagger was appointed a judge. Rebutting the scorn with which she was greeted, Hall attempted to prove her literary cachet by saying that she always kept "a copy of The Dubliners" (sic) by her bed.

It appears that if you want to sex up your book prize, get a celebrity on board to make it cooler. Names will no doubt raise the profile of the award, but how do you actually get your book nominated? Well if you're Matt Thorne, author of Cherry, it doesn't hurt that two of your friends - journalist Rowan Pelling and author Tibor Fischer - were on the 2004 Booker Prize judging panel and your book just happened to end up on the long list. Not bad if you consider that a staggering 127 books were submitted for inclusion. With the Booker, publishers can submit two novels from their stable, a work by any previous winner or any writer who has made the short list in the last ten years. They can also submit another five titles and the judges must select between eight and 12 of this for the final longlist. Pelling herself, writing in the Guardian in the run-up to the award, expressed exasperation at receiving notes of approbation from one desperate publisher and she forced herself not to reply with "It is for the judges and readers to decide whether or not this book is 'a masterpiece'." And maybe you can decide whether or not a book is a masterpiece based on how well you know the author…

Book prizes were once arenas where great literature did battle. Now their influence barely competes with recommendations from television bookclubs like Oprah or Richard & Judy. Why can't Hugh Grant and Jerry Hall occupy R&J's studio couch instead of a place on a book panel that could go to someone more knowledgeable about books or writing? The quality of writing nominated for these literary prizes is not disputed - but the prizes themselves have become PR totems to the point that the books become the most insignificant detail about the award.

Each book award has its own inherent bias. Potential books for The Booker are submitted by publishers and is only open to writers from certain countries; the Orange Prize is solely for women writers and the Whitbread, well, that's a weird one. Firstly, four books compete in five different categories - novel, first novel, biography, poetry and children's. This year's winners are Andrea Levy for Small Island (Novel), Susan Fletcher for Eve Green (First Novel), My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots by John Guy (Biography), Michael Symmons Roberts for Corpus (Poetry) and Not the End of the World by Geraldine McCaughrean (Children's) and later this month, all five will go head to head for the Whitbread Book of the Year. Still with me? A look back over past winners will reveal a disproportionate list of winners from the different categories. Unsurprisingly, the novel winner is most likely to win the overall prize. What's most surprising is how well poetry has fared as the overall winner. Since 1996, poetry has scooped Whitbread's Book of the Year Award four times - and all in a row - from 1996 to 1998. And three of those wins went to Seamus Heaney, for The Spirit Level (1996), Tales from Ovid (1997) and Beowulf (1999) respectively. Biography has only won twice in the last 15 years (excluding 2001, when Lorna Sage's Bad Blood and Matthew Kneale's English Passengers were tied and Sir Tim Rice used his casting vote to select Kneale's excellent book). The least likely contenders - based on statistics are first novel (two winners since 1992) and Children's - which has only won the main award once, probably because it was Philip Pullman's Amber Spyglass. This year's First Novel winner was already an outsider in its group as Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell had been expected to win in its category.

Alan Hollinghurst Winner of the 2004 Booker

The Whitbread Prize, coming so late in the literary season, suffers the fate of not having a chance to 'break' a new book. It tends to feature books that have already featured on other book award shortlists. This year, both the winners of the 2004 Booker and Orange Prizes - Alan Hollinghurst's In the Line of Beauty and Andrea Levy's Small Island - competed in the novel category, with Levy winning. No doubt the judges deliberated over their choices, but it would be a far more interesting award if books that hadn't already been through the PR mill had been selected. Now Hollinghurst's and Levy's book covers will be subsumed with stickers declaring their inclusion on both lists. Perhaps because people are so busy these days, with less time to read, that shiny sticker on a book cover is enough to guarantee the literary merit of a book.

The days of personal recommendation were declining until the rise of the bookclub. There's nothing like hearing someone you know guarantee a great read; if the recommendation comes from a group of six people who all loved it, all to the better. The difference between grass roots bookclubs and TV-endorsed ones is that Mr/Ms avid reader is not beholden to publisher's who are all too keen to cash in on this element of 'personal' recommendation. Are books advocated by Richard and Judy or Oprah' really worthy reads or are they being propagated because the publisher says they're great and has stumped up lots of money for the most prized product placement there is - a slot on primetime television. Somehow, this overzealous chutzpah by publishers almost diminishes the weight of a book, even if it was first-rate to begin with.

Not all awards are down to publishers or a panel of judges that may or may not have their own bias. The biggest literary prize in the world, in financial terms, is an Irish award. The Impac Award, with its hefty €100,000 prize fund is a relative newcomer to the awards circuit. Started in 1996, the winner is chosen from a list submitted by libraries in major cities around the world. Each eligible library can submit up to three books, based not on how many times they've been borrowed or whether they've shown up on a TV bookclub, but on 'literary merit'.

The biggie, though, in terms of credibility has to be the Nobel Prize for literary. TV backing and marketing don't count for much here as the award is based on a body of work by an author, not a specific book. However, this prize has often been the subject of contentious debate because of the writers who never won it (Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound) and that since its inception in 1901 only nine women have been awarded the prize - including 2004 winner Elfriede Jelinek).

Not content with being one of the main 'one-book' literary competitions, The Booker Prize is set to compete with the Nobel Prize for Literature when it launches a new 'Booker International' award this year, in addition to the annual prize. Every two years, a prize of stg£60,000 will be awarded to a writer of any nationality (the current Booker is only open to Irish, English and Commonwealth writers) based on their work to date.

As publicity is now such a huge appendage of the book trade, it may be too much to hope that winners of literary prizes will come from small publishers or haven't been heavily rotated on television or by media bookclubs. There is no doubting that great writing still makes it in to these lists, but most readers would prefer to find this out by reading the book - and not from ubiquitous ads, glossy cover stickers or TV bookclubs.

The DJ