Roald Dahl doesn’t do literary awards, but if he did, the $150,000 Windham-Campbell Prize might be it. A secret nomination process, surprise phonecalls to stunned recipients, notification emails marked as spam, and a lump sum large enough to make a significant difference to the life of a writer. Throw in a golden ticket and it’s the literary equivalent of a Willy Wonka prize.
In this age of big brand literary awards, the Windham-Campbell is a novel idea – a prize for the craft of writing that does not want to draw attention to itself. It has, of course, created hype by trying to avoid it. With an overall fund this year of $1.35 million split between nine writers, coverage of the Windham-Campbell Prizes dominated international books news last week.
Co Down playwright Abbie Spallen was one of this year’s recipients. She says the surprising win makes her work as a writer less lonely. From a practical perspective, it gives her the opportunity to explore other avenues such as writing and directing her first short film.
“I love the ethos of the Windham-Campbell,” says Spallen. “There’s no drum roll, no shortlist, no expectation. It comes as such a bolt out of the blue. It very much feels like it’s about the winners, not the award. And it’s very, very cool. Punk even. Patti Smith is doing the keynotes speech. What more could you want?”
Elsewhere last week, some less punk awards were making headlines for negative reasons. The British novelist Deborah Moggach told an audience at the Independent Bath Literature Festival that she believed awards such as the Man Booker “capsized the literary world”, with publishers paying them far too much attention.
Speaking at the same event, author Tessa Hadley – incidentally another recipient of this year’s Windham-Campbell Prize - said that it was wrong that so much emphasis was placed on the Booker when the winner was decided by the “taste, personality and character of the judges”.
Author Lionel Shriver has said literary prizes just for women are “problematic”, while calling International Women’s Day “creepy” at an event hosted by the Man Booker Prize in London to mark the occasion. The 2005 Orange Prize winner also said it would be more “meaningful” for her to win the Man Booker Prize than the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Whether awards help writers or distract from the real work is a perennial debate in the books world. Julian Barnes famously called the Booker “posh bingo”, before going on to win it in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending. Who controls what books get nominated and eventually chosen for awards is another topic often complained about in literary and publishing circles but rarely spoken of publicly.
“Asking five individuals to choose the best novel of the year [for the Man Booker] is mildly ridiculous,” says Bert Wright, curator for the Mountains to Sea literary festival. “It’s like the US Supreme Court; the judgements depend on the disposition of the judges and that varies wildly. You might as well invade any local book club and ask them to do the job.”
Wright is involved with the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards, whose online public voting system is often criticised. “But you’re as likely to arrive at a reasonable consensus this way, than to trust the judgement of learned juries in smoke-filled rooms,” he says.
Rival to the Booker
Ireland has its own rival to the Booker, the Dublin City Council-backed €100,000 International Dublin Literary Award, now in its 22nd year. A spokesperson for the award says it differs from the other main players as books are nominated through the public library system worldwide. Librarians draw on their own experience and that of their readers when selecting books and there is no input from publishers.
“Eligible books are accepted regardless of the nationality of the author, location of the publishers and may have been originally written in any other language, provided they have been translated into English in the year specified in the rules.
“The books nominated are the books that people are already borrowing from libraries around the world and in that respect the nominations reflect the tastes of readers around the world.”
Another Irish award with a distinctly home-grown feel to it is the Davy Byrnes Short Story Award, organised by The Stinging Fly in association with Dublin Unesco City of Literature. Established in 2004, it awards €15,000 for the best short story plus five runner-up prizes of €1,000.
Stinging Fly publisher Declan Meade says it was important for him that the award would be a significant one “in every possible way”. That translates to keeping the prize money as generous as possible, getting top-notch international judges on board, and publicising the award to the hilt.
Announcing long lists and shortlists are part of that publicity game, according to Meade: “You’re trying to get coverage for the award in the hope that it will benefit the writers involved. But there definitely is a danger that it becomes a bit of circus. You want it to be a positive experience for all the writers involved, or at least a benign one.”
Mrs Engels author Gavin McCrea, recently longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, tweeted in response: “On my gravestone please write: ‘HE WAS LONGLISTED’”.
Irish writers
Irish writers often feature on lists for major international awards. Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle, John Banville and Iris Murdoch have all won the Booker, while a host of other writers have been shortlisted over the years. Kevin Barry, Colm Tóibín and Colum McCann are among the winners of the International Dublin Literary Award. Enright and Lisa McInerney have this week been longlisted for the 2016 Baileys Prize for Fiction, worth £30,000.
The Frank O’Connor, Costa, Folio, TS Eliot Prize and many others besides have all seen Irish authors nominated or win. And let’s not forget the Nobel, or WB Yeats’s reaction to Irish Times editor Bertie Smyllie on hearing that he’d won: “How much, Smyllie? How much is it?”
Some Irish authors are luckier than others when it comes to the big bucks. Both of Kevin Barry’s two novels have won major awards, the International Dublin Literary Award for his debut City of Bohane, with his second novel Beatlebone recently winning the 2015 Goldsmith Prize. The Limerick author’s short fiction also earned him the largest prize in the world for a single story when Beer Trip to Llandudno won the £30,000 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize in 2012.
Ireland is represented yet again on the 2016 Sunday Times EFG longlist, announced last week. Colum McCann is nominated for his story What Time is it Now? and the Welsh writer Thomas Morris, who lives in Dublin and edits The Stinging Fly magazine, features for his story, Clap Hands.
“The Impostor Syndrome was, for a while, operating quite heavily on me, so the longlisting has given some reassurance,” says Morris. “But I know, really, that that way of thinking lies madness. A lot of great books don’t win prizes. And a lot of crap ones do. But it is lovely, and a huge privilege, to be on the longlist.”
What would he do if he won the £30,000 award? “It would keep me going for three years. I could get health insurance and be debt-free for the first time in my adult life. But I’d say the chances of me winning are fairly slim. I’m just grateful for the nod and happy that a few more people might read the stories.”
In a powerful essay in the recent London-themed issue of The Stinging Fly, author Evelyn Conlon celebrated the joys of the independent bookshop, seguing into a lament for how the awards culture has served to narrow, not broaden our reading range.
“I see the over-emphasis of prizes as the devaluation of all those wonderful mysteries we were out looking for. For all that hope flying in on wings. For the expectation that we would have to search for a book that might satisfy our particular curiosities. Now there seems to be a conspiracy to have us all reading the same book at the same time. What could be more awful, more anathema to a non-school-goer’s right to life?
“Leaving aside the fact that, yes, a prize listing has become the new black, think for a moment what multinational publishing company has control over what is even allowed to be entered, never mind make it for consideration. Of course the occasional maverick gets through, the occasional voice that adds a special light to the way you fit yourself in the world, but surely we must be suspicious of the narrowing consensus of what makes a good work? Suspicious of those who decide talent on marketability and on how ‘palatable’ we can make a real story.”
Irish publishers
As editor of The Stinging Fly, Morris also sees the awards industry from another perspective. “What’s not acknowledged is the fact that Irish publishers can’t enter quite a few of the major literary prizes,” he says. “And likewise, story collections are not eligible for many of the big ones. It’s a problem, but I’m hopeful that things will change in the next few years. The new Republic of Consciousness Prize [recently established by British author Neil Griffiths] is open to story collections published by small presses, so that’s a really encouraging development.”
The Man Booker is the biggest prize from which Irish publishers are excluded, but awards like the Costa also specify that while the book may be written by an author from the UK and Ireland, it must be published in the UK. Some, like the Guardian First Book Award, specify that the title has to have been printed in the UK.
“We pointed out that we publish our books in Ireland, the UK and the US, but the next wall we hit was that you have to have an office and pay tax in the UK,” says Lisa Coen, co-founder of Tramp Press. “A larger publisher might set up their UK imprint, which means you have a scenario favouring large commercial houses who can afford such a process, thereby excluding small independents.”
In practice this means that if a small Irish publisher has a great novel on their list which could be a contender for the Booker, such as Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart, their best option is to sell on licensing rights to a publisher with a UK office.
“That’s one reason why ambitious Irish authors are choosing UK publishers over Irish,” says Coen. “They don’t want to be excluded from major prizes. You end up with a skewed picture of where the best new fiction is being written, nurtured and published.”
Cork author Louise O’Neill has received awards for both her novels Only Ever Yours and Asking For It, including the Book of the Year at the 2015 Bord Gáis Irish Book Awards. “Awards are definitely beneficial for raising your profile within the publishing industry itself,” she says. “It’s difficult to know what impact, if any, they have upon book sales. I think that depends on the award itself and how much media coverage it receives. I’ve been lucky enough that the awards I’ve won were well run and well supported by bookshops, which is crucial.”
But while book sales, media coverage and recognition of the writing are all boons to being nominated or winning an award, it’s the financial gain that will likely have the biggest impact on the everyday existence of a writer.
“I have, like most artists, lived close to the poverty line for a long time,” says Spallen. “That’s not a complaint; it’s just a fact. When a writer says they’ve no money it doesn’t mean they can’t afford the new Prada handbag, it means they have no money for food. I no longer live in mortal fear of my boiler packing in. I can give Lidl a miss for a while. That’s the beautiful reality of it all.”
