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A recent study by American scholar James F. English, The Economy of Prestige, examines the literary prize as sociological phenomenon. The sheer number - and financial value - of awards continues to increase annually in the UK, but who do they benefit and what do they really mean for literature? As Wales reflects the trend with the launch of The Dylan Thomas Prize, Peter Finch considers poets, publicity and the courting of controversy.


   We like prizes in Wales. They fit
   our competitive culture of first past
   the post, best in breed, blue
   ribband, carved chairs, engraved
   cups, golden crowns, festive
   rosettes, red cushioned medals. We
   relish these things. We might not like
   advertising the fact – being a people
   predisposed to helping the underdog – but prizes are there to be won and win them we do. “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes” said the Dodo in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, and it does feel like that sometimes. James F. English, in his study of the cultural prize as a twentieth–century phenomenon, The Economy of Prestige, thinks this to be less a suspicion than a reality. Could he be right?

   There is a strong tradition going back to the Greeks of the award for cultural achievement. In Wales, we have our own history of awarding prizes for poetry and song at local and national Eisteddfods. The concept of cultural competition is not a novelty here and never has been. There is an idea – misplaced usually, but honourable nonetheless – that somehow or other cultural competitions are carried out on a level playing field. Singing contests are fair because they are judged in public. Literary competitions are unhampered by ego and reputation because entries are submitted under pseudonyms. The judges are supposed not to know who their entrants are. All is unbiased and straight and even. The quality of the work itself will win through. Maybe. But in a country the size of Wales hiding your style can be difficult. If you are Gillian Clarke or Robin Llewelyn how you write usually gives your name away. Nothing new there. What is new, however, is the sheer number of Awards and Prizes now out there - with more appearing almost weekly.

   English locates the start of this torrent with the establishment in 1895 of Alfred Nobel’s “gift to mankind”. This extravagantly well-funded award for creative excellence “was to act as a catalyst for a process that had been gaining momentum for some time. The idea of founding a prize (not to be sure, a prize on the scale of the Nobels….) had become, by the time of the great industrial fortunes of the Belle Époque, a perfectly natural idea.” And catalyst it was. In its wake came the Prix Goncourt (1903), The Pulitzer (1917) and then a whole flood of prizes ranging from the American National Book Award to the Somerset Maugham Award, from the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to the Anne Frank Medal, and from the Lichfield Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award. The UK Booker didn’t arrive until 1968, not that this late arrival has slowed it down.

   English sees prizes as a “struggle for power to produce value, which means power to confer value on that which does not intrinsically possess it”. What makes the prizes valuable is not so much the sum of money that changes hands (although at times this can be colossal) but the public recognition that what the prizes actually stand for has value. The realisation that a piece of art is great is rarely intuitive. Seamus Heaney, Nobel laureate, is not simply a poetry writing son of a farmer from the bogs of Ireland. He is a poet of worth. We need to be told.


What Are They For

In Wales we know that literary prizes work. The annual winner of the Eisteddfod’s Medal Rhyddiaeth for prose fiction sells by the shed load. The novel is published fresh on the maes on the very day the award is made, and the crowds clammer to get their hands on copies. Winning an Eisteddfod Crown or Chair fills the shelves with your books. The Book of the Year Award, funded by the Arts Council and maintained by the Academi, offers Welsh glitter to recent reads. In a world overrun by attention–seeking, almost anything that gets writing into the public eye is worth having.

   What all this means is that out there are businessmen trying to increase their profits, institutions attempting to honour cultural worth, industrialists bent on keeping their names alive in perpetuity, and towns, regions and countries all determined to draw attention to themselves by making the biggest cultural splashes imaginable. The rush is on and there’s no end in sight. But how many more prizes can we take? Well, any number, suggests English. “Consecration” he calls it. “Not only are there more prospective founders and sponsors of awards than ever before, but also, and less intuitively, more positions on the fields of culture where new prizes can be installed.”

   What did Wales have in 1968 when the Booker first appeared in
London? Not much. Yet today, we have the Roland Mathias Prize, the Tir Na Nog Awards, the Harri Webb Awards, the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry, the Welsh Books Council’s Book Trade Awards, the Rhys Davies Prize, the Cardiff Poetry Prize, the annual Book of the Year Award, and the new Dylan Thomas Prize. The kitty is in excess of £100,000. And this is just the non-Eisteddfod literary consecration that Wales is engaged in.


Who Wins

Who does? Is it always the underdog? The new writer on the way up - in desperate need of the boost a prize confers? Sometimes. The new Dylan Thomas Prize, due to be awarded for the first time in 2007, will offer a phenomenal £60,000 to the world’s best English-writing fictioneer under 30. In an English-language world market dominated - in simple numeric terms - by Americans, Wales is unlikely to get much of a look in. The fact that publishers will be obliged to pay handsomely to get their novels considered won’t help us much either. But - by definition - this prize will go to someone new. Unfortunately, such largesse aimed at the emerging is the exception. Cultural prizes are all too often won by the same people time and again. James English has an entertaining appendix to his book, which shows that between 1970 and 2003 the singer Michael Jackson won at least 240 prizes, everything from the American Cinema Award to the Doris Day Award for Animal-Sensitive Work. Most of these had sums of money attached, often large sums, and there’s no evidence that Jackson gave the money back. The poet John Ashbery clocks up 45 awards, with Seamus Heaney trailing at a mere 30. John Updike manages, if you include honorary degrees, more than fifty. Salman Rushdie chalks up 21, and Philip Roth 31. What begins to emerge is not that these guys (and they are mostly men) win because they need to but rather, in order to bolster the worth of their institutions, the prize organisers need them to. The Booker will always go further if it is won by a novelist already established in the market place with a distributed and obtainable novel. Even better if it is by someone the world has already heard of. Poets published by small presses don’t win. They are most likely not even eligible.

   Verse usually does badly among the general literary awards. When it comes to the novel versus the slim volume the novel almost always wins. Not that poets lack awards of their own. There are a great many out there. Many are in the form of open competitions. Pay your money, send in your anonymous poem, and walk away with anything from a book token to several thousand pounds. Contests are legion and one of the few places in the whole world of Awards where astute organisers can actually make money. Administration and promotion costs are high. Most book awards cost their organisers at least six or seven times the money value of the prizes awarded simply to run. But with poetry this is not the case. Perhaps it is because the market for verse consists mainly of actual poets rather than non-practising consumers. Does the man on the Clapham omnibus read verse? No. Poets love the idea of anonymous entry so that their poems, as well as those of Roger McGough and Carol Ann Duffy, for example, go into the same unmarked pile and are judged on their merit alone. Who you are doesn’t matter. It’s an idea with considerable appeal to the thousands of hopefuls pushing verses around in their bedrooms. And the evidence is, if the Arvon Foundation’s anthology of prize winners is anything to go by, that poets one has never heard of, from places in the Australian outback
and the wastes of northern Canada, often turn out to be the winners.
But what entrants tend to overlook is the sheer size of their opposition. Their piece of precious cultural distillation will be one among the thousands. The odds on actually getting anywhere with it are slim.

   James English tells the tale of W H Auden’s time as judge of the Yale Younger Poets series in the 1940s. Yale offers actual book publication to their winners and demands an entrance fee of $25 per submission. “No effort is made to discourage yearly resubmissions by greeting-card sonneteers or outright lunatics. Indeed, at any given time there are hundreds of completely hopeless manuscripts circulating and recirculating through the mill of America’s poetry book competitions. One competition administrator has said that fully a quarter of the submissions are of the sort that are ‘printed in silly typefaces or with drawings by the authors’ children’ and as competition administrator for the annual Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition, I can testify to that. But you can get there. Susan Wheeler’s Bag ‘o’ Diamonds was entered into contests some 88 times before it won the University of Georgia Press Award in 1993. Auden’s trick was to select either from outside of the thinned-down group of finalists presented to him by award administrators or, pronouncing the presses’ finalists unworthy, to give the prize to new poets of his acquaintance who had not actually entered in the first place. In 1955, for example, Auden discovered that both John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara had entered but had been weeded out by in-house readers. He gave the prize to Ashbery for Some Trees. The in-house reader resigned in anger.


Disputes

This story, of course, made excellent press. Controversy sells books, and it’s no surprise that a good deal of it follows book prizes around. At the Booker, tales of judges falling out with each other, with the sponsors, with the administrators, and even with the authors are commonplace. Wrong author wins. Husband of judge gets onto short list. The prize is an insult. In fact, such disputes are courted. A public fight over something as apparently arcane as a literary competition is avidly consumed by an otherwise disinterested general public. Books that might pass unnoticed move into the spotlight. Sales are secured.

   In 2004 the newly Arts Council funded but Academi-administered Book of the Year Award discovered this for itself. Rumour was rife that Meic Stevens’ autobiography Hunangofiant Y Brawd Houdini (Lolfa) had actually been composed by the singer in English, scribbled on post-it notes, and sent north to a translator who had knitted the whole thing together in Welsh. Under Book of the Year Award rules translations are ineligible. What to do? The matter was actually left to the judges to decide but this didn’t stop quite a few lively press reports, full page photos of our national treasure and reproductions of the book’s cover appearing. Book sales were buoyant. But the book didn’t win. The following year it appeared in English as Solva Blues and that didn’t win either. No reflection on its popularity. For those with an interest in 60s and 70s Welsh pop the book proved unputdownable.

   For 2005 the focus shifted to the apparent unfairness of winner taking all. At a genuinely glittering ceremony at Cardiff’s five-star Hilton, the Award in Welsh had gone to novelist Caryl Lewis for Martha, Jac a Sianco. A decision had been taken by the Academi Board to abandon second and third consolation prizes and to give the entire prize fund to the outright winner in the Welsh and English categories: £10,000 a piece. A Welsh Booker - financially substantial enough to make a small dent in the greater literary continuum. The two runners up, extremely well-turned out in their new outfits and haircuts, were not only disappointed but out of pocket. They’d stayed at Cardiff’s most expensive hotel and had to pay for their own breakfasts. They wrote letters of complaint to the organisers and to the press. More books were sold, reputations were bolstered. The Award stayed for longer in the spotlight.

   It is probable that, for future years, the Book of the Year will continue to put all its eggs in one basket but will also attempt to cover runners-up expenses. Wales is not England. Our markets are finite. In terms of literary recompense publicity alone will never be sufficient.

   The Book of the Year Award in Wales is open to any genre of creative writing. Short stories, novels or collections of poetry only. No cook books. No sports manuals. But poems rarely win. Novelists always seem to. There’s an argument here for the establishment of a special annual prize for Wales’s best new book of poetry. A Welsh T. S. Eliot Award, if you will. The R.S. Thomas, the Waldo. Yet in 2006, as I write, the poets appear to be doing well. Ifor Thomas, Christopher Meredith, Owen Sheers, Mihangel Morgan, and Alan Llwyd are all in the long running. More poets than there have been in a decade.


The Book

Despite its academic approach (prizes “mark a further stage in the post-Fordist drive of capital toward ever more flexible forms of accumulation and ever shorter turnover cycles of production and consumption”) The Economy of Prestige is actually a very etertaining read. There are,according to its author, an almost endless stream of potential prize sponsors waiting to be found. But the markets they operate in are of significance too. American, British, French, World – all are large enough to repay on investment. But when it comes to Wales the difference is considerable. Our population is by comparison small. We have an inordinately large public sector. We have two languages. Half the time we are not entirely sure who we are. Selling to us requires particular skills. The
firms that invest here do so with care. Book sponsors are therefore pretty hard to come by. Other than to note the longevity of the Eisteddfod tradition, James English barely mentions us. Thus it has always been.