Tag Archives: Book Awards

Literary prizes and the problem with the UK publishing industry

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Jamie Harris, Aberystwyth University

This year’s Booker prize shortlist offers the most diverse lineup ever with four female and two male writers, four of who are people of colour. But while the diversity of the 2020 shortlist for the best original novel is to be commended, the majority of the publishers of Booker-winning novels are still based in London.

This reflects that the concentration of power in UK publishing is still in the English capital. As such, non-English British writers published outside London are perennially disadvantaged by the Booker’s selection criteria.

And as it stands, of the 30 times the prize has been awarded to UK-based authors, it has only once gone to a Scottish author: James Kelman’s How Late it Was How Late, in 1994. It went once to a Welsh author – Bernice Rubens for The Elected Member in 1970 – while Anna Burns became the first winner from Northern Ireland in 2018 for Milkman. Three non-English, but UK-based winners, all of which were published by London presses.

The Booker is steeped in Britain’s colonial history, having originally been set up as an award for British and Commonwealth writers writing in the English language and published in the UK and Ireland.

The literary prize opened up its entry criteria in 2013 to allow submissions from writers born outside of Britain, its Commonwealth and its former colonies. This is a move that continues to rankle some prominent British authors with concerns US writers are dominating the line-up. All but one of the writers on the 2020 shortlist, are from the US or hold joint US citizenship.

Prior to this, the makeup of Booker winners was overwhelmingly male (67%), privately-educated (62%), and one-third of winners had attended Oxford or Cambridge University. No wonder, then, that Julian Barnes, former judge and winner of the prize, described it as “posh bingo”.

A publishers’ prize?

As with any literary prize, the Booker’s submission criteria has always influenced the kind of novels that are shortlisted. Its submission guidelines, which don’t allow entries from publishers who don’t publish at least two literary fiction titles a year, have created an unbalanced system.

And since a rule change in 2013, the prize is now weighted even more towards publishers with a history of having books longlisted for the prize – who are able to submit up to four entries. This change was said to be in the interest of fairness and to better “represent the levels of publishing the different sized houses do”. But many feel the changes work in favour of the bigger publishers.

Anna Burns on stage after she was awarded the Booker prize for Fiction.
Anna Burns on stage at the Guildhall in London after she was awarded the Booker prize for Fiction for her novel Milkman.
Frank Augstein/PA Archive/PA Images

In a country where publishing is so concentrated in the hands of just a few conglomerates who have acquired some of Britain’s most successful small presses, the chances of British novelists who are neither English, nor published by major London publishers, winning seems to be getting smaller. And for non-English UK novelists published by small presses (self-published works are ineligible for the Booker), the Booker is simply not a plausible option.

As Leigh Wilson, professor of English literature, has argued on this site: “Booker rules make submissions from small publishers very tricky because of the size of the print run required and the amount of money that involves.” This is compounded by the fact that: “The rules of eligibility are almost entirely now about the publisher, rather than the novel or novelist”.

Absence of small presses

The prize also often illustrates a disconnect between the publishing industry and the reading public. This gulf could be behind the surging popularity of the Guardian’s Not the Booker prize, a reader-nominated, deliberately tongue-in-cheek, rejoinder to the Booker’s perceived pomposity.

Indeed, Welsh writer Richard Owain Roberts’ debut, Hello Friend We Missed You – touted as the favourite for this year’s Not the Booker – would simply never have been considered for entry to the Booker. This is because the submission criteria makes it near impossible for small presses – like Parthian, Roberts’ Cardigan-based publisher – to even afford to enter.

This absence or marginalisation of writers in Wales, Scotland and Ireland seems not to relate to sales successes. Irish novelist Sally Rooney’s phenomenally successful Normal People, for example, didn’t make the step from longlist to shortlist for the Booker. This is despite it having a cult following, achieving substantial sales and being touted as the favourite when the longlist was announced.

But the Booker is far from alone in not reflecting bestseller lists. In his analysis of the Pulitzer prize for fiction (broadly the US equivalent of the Booker), author and academic, James F. English notes the number of shortlisted novels that also appear on that year’s top ten bestseller lists have been in steady decline – from a high point in the 1960s of 60% to under 5% in the 1990s.

That said, winning might not be all it’s cracked up to be, given a 2014 study found that literary prizes make books less popular.The Conversation

Jamie Harris, Lecturer in Literature and Place, Aberystwyth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Graphic novels are overlooked by book prizes, but that’s starting to change

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Teresa Wong’s ‘Dear Scarlet,’ Jeff Lemire’s ‘Essex County,’ and recently nominated for a 2020 Canadian literary prize, Seth’s ‘Clyde Fans.’
(Arsenal Pulp Press/Penguin Random House/Drawn&Quarterly)

Dessa Bayrock, Carleton University

In the midst of a global pandemic, almost nothing is proceeding as normal. And yet, on a dim October morning, the Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist announcement went brightly, briefly and virtually streaming into homes and revealing the five books that had moved one step further towards winning Canada’s largest and arguably most prestigious literary award.

In some ways, however, this business as usual was a disappointment. After all, the Giller recently changed its submission guidelines to allow graphic novels to be submitted to the prize, and even more recently announced that a graphic novel was, indeed, included on the longlist — Clyde Fans, by highly acclaimed Canadian author and cartoonist Seth.

But after raking in praise and aplomb for featuring a graphic novel on its longlist for the first time, the Giller — like so many other book prizes — just couldn’t bring itself to put Clyde Fans on the shortlist. Business as usual, indeed.

And are we really surprised?

Prizes reflect readership

Book prizes have long overlooked and excluded graphic novels from their submissions: if not officially barred from entry (as with the Giller, which excluded graphic novels in its submission guidelines for a quarter of a century), then unofficially (as with Canada Reads, which does not specifically bar graphic novels from consideration but hasn’t shortlisted one since 2011). As a result, graphic novels are a kind of literary elephant in the room: a format of literary fiction which many, including book prizes, refuse to recognize as “literary” fiction.

This is, however, beginning to change. Increasingly, book prizes are beginning to reflect a reality many readers, professors, librarians and publishers have known for years: that graphic novels do, in fact, have serious literary value. Graphic novels span a wide variety of content, and they’re visual narratives with the same complexity and depth as purely textual novels. It’s taken decades, but public perception has changed. And now, too, so are prizes.

After all, “good literature” is not — and never has been — a static category, but rather an ever-shifting, nebulous definition built collaboratively by anyone who’s ever picked up a book. After decades of marginalization, graphic novels are now inarguably coming to be included in this mainstream definition of what is “literary.”

Furthermore, this process of acceptance is helped in no small part by book prizes’ increasing support of graphic novels; the connections between canonization and prizes are well studied. When literary institutions hold up a graphic novel as one of “the most powerful pieces of fiction published this year,” as the Giller did when it announced its longlist in September, the reading public begins to rethink their own biases against what they think is or isn’t literary — whether they know they hold those biases or not.

A troubling trend

When we start to look at the history of graphic novels and book prizes, however, a more troubling trend seems to spring up: that despite their increasing presence on book prize long- and shortlists, graphic novels don’t ever seem to win book prizes.

For instance, Sabrina, a graphic novel by Nick Drnaso about “the story of what happens when an intimate, ‘everyday’ tragedy collides with the appetites of the 24-hour news cycle,” was longlisted by The Booker Prize in 2018 — the first time a graphic novel had ever been longlisted by the Booker.

Like Clyde Fans, it too, failed to make the prize shortlist. Earlier this year, Canada Reads similarly longlisted — but didn’t shortlist — graphic memoir Dear Scarlet by Teresa Wong, which deals with post-partum depression.

Ironically, graphic novels seem to have had better chances in the book prize world the further back we look: Essex County, a graphic novel by Jeff Lemire about a rural community in Southwestern Ontario, made the Canada Reads shortlist in 2011 — making it further in the process than Clyde Fans, Sabrina and Dear Scarlet only to get knocked out on the first day of competition.

Going back even further, the highly-acclaimed Maus by American author and artist Art Speigelman won a Pulitzer in 1992. The book (full title: Maus: A Survivor’s Tale) shows Spiegelman interviewing his father, a Polish Jew, about his memories of surviving the Holocaust during the Second World War.

Even so, Maus didn’t win a Pulitzer for literature, but rather a Pulitzer Special Citation — which basically equates to a Pulitzer given by a jury when they’re not quite sure what category to put it in. Is it literature? Is it art? Is it memoir? Is it history? The answer: it’s a special citation.

Literary evolution remains slow

If these kinds of approaches to recognizing graphic novels seems like gatekeeping what we consider “serious literature,” that’s because it is.

These prizes have been slow to shift away from a European high-culture approach, demonstrating how infuriatingly slowly the western literary canon evolves, especially in any direction away from the exclusionary principles it was and is founded on.

It is, frustratingly, a sluggish and non-linear progression — both in the public perception of what is and is not “literary,” and the ways in which literary institutions such as prizes reflect those perceptions.

This is only underscored by the fact that a graphic novel won’t win the Giller this year, and a graphic novel probably won’t win it next year, either. But eventually, one day, it’ll happen — and if this new trend of graphic novels hitting prize longlists is any indication, it’s a future we’re moving closer to all the time.The Conversation

Dessa Bayrock, PhD Student, Department of English, Carleton University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

African literary prizes are contested — but writers’ groups are reshaping them

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Best-selling Nigerian novelist and literary superstar Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Armando Babani/EPA-EFE

Doseline Kiguru, Rhodes University

Literary prizes do more than offer recognition and cash to writers and help readers decide what book to choose. They shape the literary canon, a country’s body of highly regarded writing. They help shape what the future classics might be.

But what if Africa’s biggest prizes are awarded by foreign territories; former colonial masters? Or what if African-born writers in the diaspora are routinely chosen as winners over writers living and working in Africa?

Debates have been raging over these issues in recent years, especially relating to the lucrative Caine Prize for African Writing.

The words ‘award’ or ‘prize’ imply that there was a selection process and the best emerged as winner. The awarding of value to a text through the literary prize industry involves selection and exclusion in which some texts and authors are foregrounded, becoming the canon.

The scholar John Guillory argues, in addition, for the need to

reconstruct a historical picture of how literary works are produced, disseminated, reproduced, reread, and retaught over successive generations and eras.

The issues are complex and the landscape is changing. My research covers how prizes create taste and canon – but also the increasing role played by literary organisations to shape those prizes and hence the canon.

Writers’ organisations mainly provide a social space for writers. There are dozens across the continent. Sometimes they include a publishing avenue, workshops, fellowships and competitions. In general, they have aimed to fill gaps left by mainstream literary bodies such as publishers, universities and schools, and book marketers.

To understand the process of creative writing on the African continent it’s useful to focus on the interrelationship between prize bodies and writers’ organisations in contemporary literary production.

The Caine, the Commonwealth and writers’ organisations

The Caine Prize for African Writing and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize are two major awards for contemporary Africa that have been cited as significant in promoting up-and-coming writers to become global writers. Both trade in the short story.

The Commonwealth, an initiative of the Commonwealth’s agency for civil society, awards unpublished fiction. The Caine, a charity set up in the name of the late literary organiser Sir Michael Caine, only accepts already published work. The cash reward that comes with winning these prizes is a major factor in their popularity on the continent.

But they are also significant in the growth of the short story genre. This is why I am interested in the partnerships that have emerged between prize bodies and writers’ organisations. Together they are influencing literary production structures from creative writing training to publishing and marketing texts.

Both the Caine and the Commonwealth prizes have partnered with African based writing organisations – like Uganda’s FEMRITE and Kenya’s Kwani? – to organise joint creative writing workshops.

The Caine holds annual workshops for its longlisted writers. These mostly take place in Africa, working with local writers’ organisations. Sometimes the resulting writing is entered into competitions and in this way, the prize body both produces and awards literary value.

Many of these writers’ organisations are headed by people who were canonised through the international prize, and sometimes the writing trainers and competition judges are also previous winners.

With such links it then becomes important to analyse the literary texts produced within these networks with the awareness of the importance of a text’s social, cultural and political context. The literary product becomes a reflection of the different systems of power at play.

Power at play

A good illustration of this power play can be found in best-selling Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story Jumping Monkey Hill. It tells of a fictional creative writing programme for African writers run by the British Council. The story, set in South Africa, narrates the experiences of the writers, who are all expected to write about African realities in order to have their stories published internationally. The writers come to the workshop ready to learn how to improve their skills but encounter setbacks mainly because the trainer has a preconceived idea of what ‘plausible’ African stories should be. These writers have to understand the power play in place and then make a choice.

Jumping Monkey Hill acknowledges the role played by the creative writing institution in the production of literature as a commodity that must fit market demands. For this reason, the increasing investment of African based writers’ organisations in the literary production scene can also be understood as a political move. It is also an effort to influence the literature coming out of the continent and shape the canon.

An advert for a workshop run by writers’ organisation Short Story Day Africa.
SSDA

Why writers’ organisations matter

Contemporary African writers’ organisations are deliberately involved in canon formation by taking an active role in the production and distribution of literature. They understand that the uneven distribution of economic and cultural capital results in misrepresentations, or lack of representation, within the canon.

Writers’ organisations such as FEMRITE, Kwani?, Farafina, Writivism, Storymoja and Short Story Day Africa, among others, are active in the literary industry through publishing, creative writing programmes and providing access to major award organisations and international publishers.

They are, in the process, contributing to canon formation.

Short Story Day Africa, for instance, pegs its yearly competitions on the promise that the winning stories will be automatically submitted for the Caine Prize. In fact, the 2014 Caine winning story and one other shortlisted story were initially published in its anthology Feast, Famine and Potluck (2013).

In the African academy, creative writing is usually offered as a single course within a larger programme or is available only at selected universities. This has resulted in a market gap that has been quickly filled by writers’ organisations. They fill this gap by offering short term courses on various aspects of creative writing. This is in part because the local literary organisation possesses the cultural capital necessary to link writers to prize organisations and publishers, and therefore to global visibility.The Conversation

Doseline Kiguru, Postdoctoral research fellow, Rhodes University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The 2019 British Book Awards – Independent Bookshop of the Year Shortlist

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The link below is to an article that takes a look at the shortlist for the 2019 British Book Awards Independent Bookshop of the Year award.

For more visit:
https://publishingperspectives.com/2019/02/british-book-awards-program-names-nine-independent-bookshop-shortlists/