Philip Hensher has taken aim at the current glut of book awards. But the gongs are here to stay
Ali Smith’s Baileys prize win this week was a fabulous achievement, ensuring that her joyous, and formally innovative, novel will be the holiday reading of choice for readers way beyond the diehard followers of literary fiction. But as one of the other contenders remarked at the Hay festival last weekend – and as I’ve written before– books prizes are one arena in which the winner doesn’t take all.
After all, the way that the prize culture encourages us to mistake novelists for participants in the World Crown Green Bowling Competition 2015, gagging for a four-foot trophy in silver-gilt is, in the end, rather silly.
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