The decision of the Pulitzer Prize 2012 board not to award the prize for fiction once again focused attention on the role of literary awards. Some praised the brave and unusual step of the selection committee for feeling they genuinely couldn’t choose between the novels of David Foster Wallace, Karen Russell and Denis Johnson. Yet, for others, it represented an opportunity missed in terms of boosting sales and raising the profile of any would-be winners. On the other side of the Atlantic, the perception that the 2011 Booker Prize privileged ‘readability’ over artistic merit provoked leading literary figures to devise the Literature Prize to ‘establish a clear and uncompromising standard of excellence’. Yet the Literature Prize merely joins an ever-expanding list of possible garlands for published authors, most notably the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize), Costa Book Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Warwick Prize for Writing, the James Tait Memorial Prize… Today, some argue, not being awarded a prize, or even refusing one, is more of a mark of distinction than winning an award.

Critics of prizes generally dismiss them as cynical marketing ploys from publishers or as exercises in elitism, largely governed by literary cliques and fashions. For their defenders, they provide a vital role in developing and supporting new writers, while offering an essential dose of critical judgement in the public arena. Yet with judging panels increasingly made up of celebrities and other non-literary figures (and sometimes being done away with altogether in favour of a popular vote) there seems to be a certain unease from both sides over what role the public should play in proceedings, and a lack of consensus over what constitutes excellence and artistic value or makes a work challenging. The decision to award obscure Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011 can hardly be said to have generated a popular interest in his work.

Are literary prizes part of a healthy critical culture, or do they risk becoming an unhappy replacement for it? While plenty are willing to criticise a culture of ‘all must have prizes,’ is it true that being unwilling to make judgements (on a variety of criteria) is just as corrosive to literature? Are some prizes better than others? Who are the real winners, and are there any losers?

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