Young Muslim Writers Awards 2018

by Catriona Troth

On the first of December this year, I had the pleasure of once again attending the annual Young Muslim Writers Awards, organised by the Muslim Hands charity. This event has been showcasing young talent since 2010. One of the early winners, Mina B Mohammad, went on to turn her short story into a novel which she published at the age of just 16. So the event, held this year in Senate House, University of London, is one I always look forward to.

In addition to the awards for writers in different age groups, YMWA also gives out a Special Award to a young person who has made an exceptional contribution to the education and empowerment of young people. In the first year I attended, three years ago, the award went to Malala. This year it was given to the children of Grenfell. The award was accepted by a group of eight children of all backgrounds who were all members of Kids on the Green - an organisation that is helping the young people to come to terms with the trauma they have suffered through music, art and drama. The group spoke movingly about dealing with panic attacks and flashback, of losing their homes and having to live in overcrowded hotel accommodation. Then they asked the audience to stand and hold a minutes silence in honour of the 72 Grenfell residents who lost their lives.

Once again, those presenting the awards reiterated the importance of hearing stories from the voices of all our communities.

Zainub Chohan, the awards’ organiser, reminded us of the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the danger of the single story.

Irfan Master, author of Out of Heart, spoke of giving a writing workshop in a school where many of the children were of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage. When he invited them to begin by creating a character, they all started with character with white British names. When he challenged them, they told him, “No one wants to read stories about us.”

Tim Robinson from the Anne Frank Trust pointed out that he was standing on the stage where - in the recent BBC television drama, Bodyguard - the Home Secretary was blown up by a bomb. Many viewers followed the gripping series, only to be disappointed that the showrunners fell back in the end on the tired trope of a Muslim terrorist. These stereotypes need to be challenged, he said, and it is the voices of young Muslims that will do it.

As always, it was the children’s own words that spoke most powerfully. Robinson quoted from a Instruments of Harmony by Amiera, shortlisted in the KS4 poetry category.

We will catch the lost voices of the bold, 

And let their stories be passionately told. 

Finally the instruments of harmony will be played, 

And our voices will sing in unity - no longer afraid.

Ameerah, winner of the KS 3 journalism award for Daggers Drawn, her piece examining knife crime in London described a woman who has just lost her son.

She sits across the table from me, clothed in a light Nigerian robe. Her hair is pulled pack in a neat bun; her face is perfectly made up. The only sign of trauma is in her eyes. Eyes that wander with no fixed point, glistening with tears. Eyes that do not seem to acknowledge there is another person in the room.

But these young writers also showed that they would not be pigeonholed into writing only about ‘Muslim issues.’

Umar who was shortlisted last year for his poem Oggletrog, won the KS1 poetry category this year for his poem Gluttbuts and Trumpalots that again channelled the linguistic playfulness of Edward Lear and Roald Dahl - but this time demonstrated an edge of political satire with its swipe at greed and excess consumption.

Gofradump Gluttbutt, greedy and sly,
Suited and booted in his dotty red tie
...
Pie factory owner and Chief Taster
Eats like a pig and a horrid food waster

Fatema, winner of the KS2 poetry award held the room spellbound reading her poem, Awakening: the wonderous journey from seed to flower.’

Dormant
we lie
swathed in robes
of cimmerian
shade

Winner of the KS2 short story award, Numa’s story A Feathery Tale, praised for the judges for its accomplished storytelling and elegant use of language, was a fantasy whose central character was a bird.

Lulu was a hoopoe, with a majestic crown of black-tipped feather that constantly opened and closed like an elaborate book. It was the closing of the day, the blood-shot sun bleeding into the sunset and diamonds encrusted the sky.

Finally, the Writer of the Year was chosen - winner of the KS4 short story award, Sabir Hussain Miah for his story The Worst Plan Ever. Caught on the hop - until he received the news that he’d been shortlisted he had forgotten he had even submitted his story to the event, and certainly didn’t expect to win! - he nonetheless spoke movingly about being inspired by his own experience of bullying to write his story about overcoming prejudice and finding the strength to come out of darkness.

This year, Muslim Hands had announced that was giving the Writer of the Year and someone from their family the chance to visit one of the schools that they have built around around the world. I hope the trip inspires Sabir to yet more amazing writing!

It is always such a pleasure to attend this event. The 2019 event is already open to submission - so parents and teachers, if you have a talented young Muslim writer in your midst, please do encourage them to submit!

Jhalak Prize 2018

By Catriona Troth

It has once again been my complete pleasure to read all six of the books from the Jhalak Prize shortlist (and as many as I could from the longlist). 

As I read through the list, I kept thinking I had found the book that could not possibly be beaten - only to find another equally as powerful. So many of these books punched me in the gut, I cannot imagine how the judges (Sunny Singh, Catherine Johnson, Tanya Byrne, Vera Chok and Noo Saro-Wiwa) are going to pick an eventual winner. Whoever it is, they will deserve all possible plaudits.

The winner will be announced on Thursday 15^th but on the eve on the announcement, here is my review of this year’s amazing nominees.

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

In a series of eloquently argued chapters, Eddo-Lodge addresses (among other things) the erasure of Black Britons from British history, the nature of White Privilege, the failure of White Feminism to engage with issues of racism, the often overlooked intersections of race with class - and what white people should be doing to tackle racism.

I want to put this book into the hands of every good-hearted, liberal-minded white person I know and say, ‘please read this; please try and understand. We are all complicit, but we don’t have to be.’

Catriona Troth’s full review on BookMuse

When I Hit You, Or Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy

I climb into the incredible sadness of silence. Wrap its slowness around my shoulders, conceal its shame within the folds of my sari.

A fictionalised account of domestic violence and rape within a marriage, told through many different lenses. It begins with the mother recounting, over and over, the state of her daughter’s feet when she fled home. It covers letters written to imaginary lovers, and deleted before her husband can come home and read them. It goes through story boards of films she will make of her experiences, before dropping, intermittently into unvarnished accounts of a classic pattern of domestic abuse - control, isolation, verbal abuse, physical, sexual, and finally death threats.

Victims of abuse are often confronted with the question, ‘Why didn’t you just leave?’ Kandasamy takes you so deep inside her narrator’s head you are forced to acknowledge the funnelling of her choices into just one, narrow conduit.

Catriona Troth’s full review on BookMuse

The Island At the End of Everything by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

There are some places you would not want to go. Even if I told you that we have oceans filled with sea turtles and dolphins, or forests lush with parrots that call through air thick with warmth. Nobody comes here because they want to. The island of no return.

From 1906 to 1998, Culion became with world’s biggest leper colony. In the early part of the 20th C, thousands of those touched by the disease were forcibly transported to the island, their healthy children taken from them by government authorities to avoid further contamination. This is a story of cruelty promulgated by arrogant authorities believing they know best and failing utterly to see the subjects of their experiments as whole people. A story of love and trust, hope and reconciliation, told in language that is both simple and utterly poetic.

Catriona Troth’s full review on BookMuse

The Golden Legend by Nadeem Aslam

Nadeem Aslam’s novel contains images of such lyricism they feel almost like the creations of a magical realist - beginning with scale models of two of the world’s most famous mosques, which in the winter form cosy work cabins for two architects and in summer are winched up into the rafters out of the way. But the novel is rooted firmly - and grimly - in reality.

The Golden Legend examines religious extremism, intolerance, the concept of blasphemy, and the consequences of India and Pakistan’s long tug of war over Kashmir. Its portrayal of modern day Pakistan is brutal - a searing indictment of the ever-narrowing definition of ‘purity’ applied to determine who belongs in ‘The Land of the Pure’ - first rooting out Hindus and Sikhs, then all-but eliminating other minority religions, and now turning equally ruthlessly on sects within Islam. But just as importantly, The Golden Legend holds up a mirror to Britain and the USA, warning them of the consequences path they have both embarked on, of narrowing what it means to be British or American.

Catriona Troth’s full review on BookMuse

Once Upon a Time in the East by Xialou Guo

A memoir of growing up in China, of peasant existence in the 1970s, and the immense changes that have swept over China since the end of the Cultural Revolution. It is also the story of a struggle to develop an identity and a creative voice, first in a collective society, and then later, marooned and isolated as an immigrant in a foreign country.

Fascinating as Guo’s account of her life in China is, it is her struggle to find a creative voice in a strange country and in an unknown tongue that I found most absorbing. It always seems extraordinary to us stubbornly monoglot Anglophones when someone expresses themselves creatively in a language they did not grow up with. But the gulf that Guo had to cross was far more than merely linguistic. It required an entirely new mode of thinking.

“How could someone who had grown up in a collective society get used to using the first person singular all the time? The habitual use of ‘I’ requires thinking of yourself as a separate entity in a society of separate entities.”

Catriona Troth’s full review on BookMuse

Kumakanda by Kayo Chingonyi

The title of Kayo Chingonyi’s debut book of poetry, Kumukanda, refers to the initiation rites that young boys of the Luvale, Chokwe, Luchazi and Mbunda people in north western Zambia must pass through to be considered a man. As the author says, ‘This book approximates such rites of passage in the absence of my original culture.’

The book begins with poems about growing up in south London and a ‘white flight’ town outside London, about his relationship with music and rap and how that helped forge his identity. But Chingonyi moves on from that. His poems address casual racism, colonialism, the reduction of Africa to the single image of a dying child. A whole group of poems deal with the loss, at a young age, of both his father and his mother.

These are poems that combine lyrical beauty with razor-sharp political commentary. Chingonyi said, in an interview with the ICA Bulletin in 2016, that one of his aims in writing is to “chip away at the motion that whiteness is the normative unmediated position from which all other subjectivities deviate.” Which makes him a perfect fit for the Jhalak Prize shortlist.

Catriona Troth’s full review on BookMuse

And also from the shortlist:

 We That Are Young by Preti Taneja

A darkly comic study of a monstrously dysfunctional family that is also so, so much more. Directors of Shakespeare’s plays can suggest settings in time and place the give context to the drama. But in transporting the story to India and fleshing out the location through the rich medium of the novel, Taneja has at once breathed entirely new life into a classic text, held a mirror held up to the faults and frailties of modern India, and created a powerful metaphor for greed, cruelty and corruption everywhere.

Catriona Troth’s full review on BookMuse

Come All You Little Persons by John Agard

The first test for a picture book is how it reads out loud. And, as you would expect from a poet like Agard, Come All You Little Persons has the rhythm that makes that a joy. The second test is whether is stands being read again and again, with enough to hold the interest of both adult and child. Come All You Little Persons passes that test with flying colours.

Catriona Troth’s full review on BookMuse

 Worry Angels by Sita Brahmachari

Two very different young girls, both facing massive life changes, are eased into their new Secondary School by the wonderful Grace Nuala and her messy colourful art house. Written in clear, simple English and beautifully illustrated by Jane Ray, this would suit young readers struggling with anxiety or those learning about refugees. But equally, it would be an excellent book for slightly older children learning English as an additional language. Worry Angels is full of warmth and empathy and above all, hope.

Catriona Troth’s full review on BookMuse

The Jhalak Prize 2017

AND THE WINNER IS: 

JACOB ROSS FOR THE BONE READERS

by Catriona Troth

On Friday 17th March, the winner of the inaugural Jhalak Prize for books written by British BAME authors was announced from a shortlist of six. Fiction and non-fiction, books for adults and books for children: all have been represented on the shortlist and I can’t begin to imagine how the judges are going to pick the final winner.

I’ve spent the last couple of months reading all the books on the Jhalak short and long lists and reviewing them for Book Muse UK. It has been an absolute joy - every one of the books a voyage of discovery. You can read extracts from my reviews below but first, here are some comments from four of the panel of judges: chair of the judging panel, Sunny Singh and her colleagues Musa Okwanga, Yvvette Edwards and Catherine Johnson.

Why were you keen to support the inaugural Jhalak Prize?

Sunny Singh: I founded the Jhalak Prize because I was tired of seeing brilliant writing not receive the attention it deserves, from the press, bookstores, prizes and therefore never getting to readers. And of course I was seeing great writing either not being published or not being published properly. I have been thinking about the prize for about four years now but after the Writing the Future report and various other attempts at raising the issues, we decided go ahead with it. I was at the Polari Prize and got talking to the judges and supporters and realised that a prize may push the issue into consciousness for the various players in the industry. Of course, I am also being selfish: I want to read the writing I love from writers I love. And hopefully Jhalak can help bring them into the market.

Catherine Johnson: The prize came out of BareLit, an incredible crowdfunded festival - I have been a published writer for over twenty years, and it has always been said, if not openly then tacitly that there is not the big audience for books written by BAME authors. This was the first time it was made blatantly clear that there really was a readership and an audience hungry for those stories.

Also, sadly, the 'big' awards in my field - eg The Carnegie, consistently ignore BAME writers - only two have ever been shortlisted in its 80 year history. Here is a chance to give those books air and space and the accolades they deserve. If the mainstream ignore us, why not do it ourselves?

Musa Okwanga: I feel that it is vital that writing of the highest quality gets its due recognition, whoever makes it; and that, so far, too many people of colour do not have the platform that their talents deserve. The Jhalak Prize, in my view, is a wonderfully proactive and progressive way to address that concern.


Just as the Baileys Prize (formerly the Orange Prize) did initially, any literary prize that restricts it potential entrants to a given category of writers tends to attract criticism that entrants are being judged not for their writing but by their gender/colour of skin etc. How do you answer that criticism in the case of the Jhalak Prize?


Sunny Singh: I don't and I won't answer this question! We know the playing field is not level. We have the statistics, the reports, the endless reams of paper but when we flag up the iniquities we are told to 'quit whining and do something.' Well, the Jhalak Prize is us DOING something. You don't like the Jhalak Prize? Then start with working to make that playing field level and actually based on meritocracy!

Catherine Johnson: I think the Bailey's Prize is a good parallel, it may have been contentious at the start but readers understand and accept it as a useful award which draws attention to the best of women's writing. Of course it would be brilliant if we didn't need a prize like this and there was that level playing field we've heard so much about. But there isn't. Society has its flaws. We could either lie down and accept that books by BAME authors are going to be overlooked or do something to draw attention to the fantastic breadth and depth of writing out there.

Musa Okwanga: I would say that this form of criticism of the Jhalak Prize is a little like criticising a doctor for diagnosing and providing medicine for an ailment, rather than criticising the causes of the ailment itself. Because I think that the lack of diversity in publishing at the moment is an ailment, and one which is depriving us all of some of the most exciting writing out there. So let’s do what we can to cure that.

Yvvette Edwards: There are many literary prizes. There are prizes that restrict submissions to writers from a particular part of the country, ones that only judge debuts or second novels or crime or romance or science fiction, or writers of a particular age or religion or gender, or any of a hundred other criteria. It is not a matter of discrimination why this is so, but an effort to ensure that writers who are unlikely to be put forward to or nominated for the big literary prizes, yet are nonetheless producing great writing - sometimes very progressive, experimental and original writing that deserves a wider audience - that those writers are acknowledged and the quality of their work is recognised. In the case of the Jhalak Prize, there’s nothing ominous about it; it’s simply another literary prize with a submission criterion.


It must be particularly challenging to judge a prize that encompasses non-fiction, adult fiction and young adult fiction and fiction for children. How have you approached making those sorts of comparisons?

Sunny Singh: As chair of judging panel, my role has been mostly to hear out what the panel has says. I think we were clear that books were judged within the category they fell. So YA was seen as amazing within that particular category. Nonfiction the same. And the rest. We got particularly lucky as so many of the books also transcended their particular tag. The shortlist is utterly extraordinary.

Catherine Johnson: I think this is one of the strengths of the prize. Isn't it marvellous to say Children's and YA are just as important as non fiction and literary fiction? Our prize is about readers just as much as writers, about saying to readers how wonderful and rich and varied the work that BAME writers are producing.

Musa Okwanga: The only true challenges have been the creation of a longlist, and then a shortlist - to say nothing of selecting the eventual winner. When judging work, I think that we have all tried to look for originality, for creativity - it will sound like cliche, but we have looked for work which has a unique voice. It’s been very difficult to narrow the submissions down, but I am confident that we have managed that.

Yvvette Edwards: The task was made much easier by the fact that we were not required to longlist a specific number of books. The decision was made early on that every book that deserved to be on the longlist would be, which meant that we were able to put forward every book that the judging panel agreed deserved to be nominated, irrespective of whether it was non-fiction or adult, children or YA fiction. Once we were down to the longlist, we had lengthy discussions about the merits of each book, judging them on their own terms and within their genre.


Can you tell us what has particularly excited you about any of the six books on the shortlist?

Sunny Singh: Gosh all of them! Insightful, innovative. One of the judges commented at a meeting that the longlist was made up of great books and the shortlist is all phenomenal ones. It's been a pleasure to read and reread them during the judging process. And one can't say that about many books, forget about all on a shortlist!

Catherine Johnson: Definitely the breadth and depth. Look at those books, every one is a total gem. I have no idea which is the winner, they all deserve the prize.

Musa Okwanga: We all have our own favourites, I am sure, but I have loved the bravery of the work - the fearlessness and empathy shown in tackling the most taboo of subjects. That’s all I feel that I can say publicly, but I will have to drop that particular writer a private message of congratulation at some point.

Yvvette Edwards: I have to say - and I am not attempting to be diplomatic or coy - that all the shortlisted books excite me. Every one of those books deserved its place on the Jhalak Prize shortlist and to be widely read. Although I had a couple of favourites in mind, I approached the final judging panel with an open mind, because any of those books would have been a worthy winner of the inaugural prize.


Finally, what are your hopes for the future of the Jhalak Prize?

Sunny Singh: I started the prize with the hopes of ending it! The prize succeeds when it is no longer needed. So that is all I hope for: that one day, in not too far future, a prize like the Jhalak Prize will not be necessary because it will truly be a 'level playing field.' I guess one can and must dream!

Catherine Johnson: I think the prize has hit the ground running, I hope it will grow and earn a reputation for flagging up brilliance across genres.

Musa Okwanga: That it will continue to flourish and to provide a platform for spectacular writing for as long as it is needed. It has been a pleasure, an honour and a privilege to have helped it on its way.

Yvvette Edwards: I hope it becomes an established fixture in the literary calendar, and that it goes from strength to strength.


Thank you! Look out for the announcement of the winner on the evening of Friday 17th March 2017.
Now here are my reviews of the six shortlisted books. 

Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge

A day chosen at random - unremarkable in any way, including for the number of young people to die of gunshot wounds in a 24 hour period. On this day, seven of those killed were black, two Hispanic and one white. The oldest was nineteen; the youngest nine. “The truth is it’s happening every day, only most do not see it.”

Each chapter is both a personal account of a young person whose life and death would otherwise have passed unremarked by anyone outside their immediate neighbourhood, and an essay on the factors that create this appalling death rate.

Segregation also creates a numbing distance across which empathy becomes all-but impossible. This book may be one strut in a bridge across that divide.

Genre: Non-Fiction

Read my full review here.

Speak Gigantular by Irenosen Okojie

Following on from her Betty Trask winning debut novel, Butterfly Fish, Speak Gigantular is Irenosen Okojie’s first collection of short stories. And it is almost certainly not like any other short story collection you have ever read. Okojie’s writing rarely stays long in the recognisable world of the five senses. In these stories, emotions take on physical form.

These are unsettling stories. Reading them is like walking through one of those trick rooms whose crooked walls make you think the floor is unstable. Okojie’s range is formidable and her imagination extraordinary.

Genre: Short Stories

Read my full review here.

The Bone Readers by Jacob Ross

Two cold cases twist and turn through the pages of The Bone Readers. Michael ‘Digger’ Digson needs to find the truth behind the death of his mother, killed when he was a young boy. And his boss, Detective Superintendent Chilman, is obsessed with the case of Nathan, a young man who disappeared and whose mother is convinced he was murdered.

Written by Granadan born Jacob Ross, The Bone Readers is set on a tiny, fictional Caribbean island. The multiple strands of the book all play on themes of sexual violence, sexual exploitation, gender power struggles and corruption. The women in the book are tough, shrewd, emotionally intelligent and sassy. Yet they are trapped by male prejudice, male violence and the male stranglehold on power. Many carry scars from the sexual violence they have experienced.

An unconventional crime novel, and one that exposes the dark underbelly of ‘paradise.’

Genre: Crime Fiction

Read my full review here.

The Girl of Ink and Stars by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Ink and stars - the two most fundamental tools of the cartographer.

Isa is the daughter of a cartographer, and his unofficial apprentice. But Isa’s Da no longer roams the world to map its continents, but walks heavily supported by a stick. And the only guide to the Forbidden Forest is an ancient cloth map left behind by Isa’s mother. So when a girl is found dead in the Governor’s orchard, and his daughter, Isa’s friend Lupe, disappears into the forest, it is up to Isa to don the mantle of cartographer and guide the search party into the heart of the island, where no one has travelled for years.

Maps have a magic about them. They can say as much about the people who made them as they do about the lands they depict. Kiran Millwood Hargrave has spun that magic into a tale of adventure that is - as all good heroic journeys should be - about friendship and courage, self discovery and self sacrifice.

Genre: Fiction for 9-12 year olds.

Read my full review here.

Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga

Written as a companion to the BBC television series of the same name, David Olusoga’s book shows how the Black presence in Britain can be traced back to Roman times and has been a feature of life, particularly in London and other big cities, since Tudor times. It demonstrates how British economic interest, first in the slave trade itself and then in slave-produced cotton, warred for centuries with a mixture of the exalted believe that British air was ‘too pure for slaves to breathe’ and genuine courageous humanitarianism.

Britain may have been one of the first countries to outlaw the slave trade, but in the years before abolition, it was also its biggest player. As Olusoga shows, British involvement in the slave trade began in the early 17th C and gained the Royal seal of approval in 1672. In just the 20 years before the slave trade was outlawed by Act of Parliament in 1807, three quarters of a million slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas aboard British ships.

Britain has things to be proud of in the history of relations with its Black citizens, but much to be ashamed of too. A powerful, emotional and eye-opening read.

Genre: Non-Fiction

Read my full review here.

A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee

Calcutta in 1919.The “Quit India” movement is beginning to gain momentum. Calls for violent uprising clash with Gandhi’s approach of non-violent noncooperation. And the British were doubling down on their control with an oppressive set of laws called the Rowlatt Acts. In the midst of this, a senior British civil servant is found murdered in the ‘wrong’ part of town, with piece of paper stuffed in his mouth inscribed with a subversive slogan.

Mukherjee takes you down into the streets of Calcutta, from the stinking gullees of Black Town and the opium dens of Tiretta Bazaar, to the poky guesthouses for the itinerant British, where “the mores of Bengal were exported to the heat of Bengal,” the maroon-painted colonial neo-classic buildings of the Imperial civil service and the exclusive clubs of the rich, mini Blenheim Palaces, sporting signs that declare ‘No dogs or Indians beyond this point.’

Genre: Crime Fiction, Historical Fiction

Read my full review here.

And my own personal favourite? One that only made it to the longlist, the haunting novel Augustown by Kei Miller.

Augustown by Kei Miller

Augustown is a poor suburb of Kingston, Jamaica, set up by the slaves set free by royal decree on 1st August 1838. It is also closely associated with Alexander Bedward, the preacher who inspired Bedwardism, the roots from which grew Rastafarianism.

Kei Miller’s novel takes place largely in 1982, when most of those who remember Bedward are dead or dying and the events of his life have become tales told by grandmothers like Ma Taffy. And on the day that Ma Taffy sits up straight on her verandah and smells something high and ripe in the air, she knows an autoclapse is coming. ( Autoclapse: (Noun) Jamaican Dialect. An impending disaster; Calamity; Trouble on top of trouble.)

A stunning novel that takes modern Jamaican history (and the history of Rastafarianism in particular) and spins from it a fable the might stand for any people suffering from ingrained economic disadvantage and religious intolerance.

Genre: Literary Fiction

Read my full review here.



Finally, a couple of 'special mentions' from Yvvette Edwards of books that did not make the longlist:

"One of the books that excited me was Hibo Wardere’s incredibly brave memoir, Cut: One Woman’s fight against FGM in Britain Today, which was a harrowing yet life-affirming read. Another personal favourite of mine was a children’s book, The No1 Car Spotter Fights the Factory, by Atinuke. Aimed at 6 to 9 year olds, it was a social commentary on the positive power of social media and the capacity of the community to affect change, whilst exploring the reality of the lives of the poor in third world countries and the ways in which they are exploited by large corporations. At the same time, it was a genuinely enjoyable and accessible read."

Prize Idiocy by Sarah Bower

The culture of literary prizes

There are many oddities and anomalies in the writer’s life, not least the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the gibbering lunatic hunched over her keyboard in her pyjamas at three in the afternoon, surrounded by mugs of cold tea and biscuit crumbs (oh, and don’t you just yearn for the days when it was whisky dregs and fag ends!), and that poised person in front of the microphone at some awards dinner, clutching flowers and svelte in her little black dress and kitten heels. Of course, the writer’s life is much like anyone else’s in many ways. Writers pay taxes, go to the supermarket, forget to feed the cat, struggle with their children’s maths homework, put up shelves, bake cakes, blow up car tyres… You get the picture. But the gibbering in pyjamas and the whole flowers/podium/ little black dress thing are the extremes, and, as a fiction writer, I deal in extremes, even when they are of the silent screaming kind.

Silent screaming might be said to epitomise my attitude to literary prizes. There will be those among you who will attribute this to the taste of sour grapes in my mouth. I have not won any literary prizes of note, and I am under no illusions about my chances of doing so - I’m a woman, for starters, and I didn’t go to Oxbridge. But you would be wrong. I would not want to win a major literary prize. In fact, I would like to think I would have the strength of mind to put my money where my mouth is and refuse to allow my books to be submitted to any prize committees. This is not to imply criticism of those writers whose books do win prizes. I count several among my acquaintance who have won major prizes, and I am delighted for them. It brings them deserved recognition and even more deserved boosts to their bank balances. Their success, however, and my friendship, do nothing to diminish my profound discomfort with this particular aspect of the writer’s life.

I happened to be brunching recently with a group of friends from various walks of literary life and mentioned my intention to write about the ‘problem’ of literary prizes. Immediately, an enthusiastic debate developed - about the traditional profile of the Man Booker winner (white, male, middle class, privately educated, Oxbridge), about whether or not the Baileys still has a place in the world now Hilary Mantel wins the Man Booker every other year, the effects on the prize-winning demographic of American and post-colonial writers (whom some might see as one and the same…) A crime writer among us stuck in her Golden Dagger on behalf of prizes for genre novels. Another parried with the suggestion that literary fiction is surely just another genre and that anyway, it’s all meaningless and imposed on the amorphous population of bookshops by publishers’ marketing departments, not to mention by Amazon and whatever terrifyingly hilarious algorithm ‘personalises’ purchasers’ pages. ‘if you liked The Luminaries, you might enjoy Astrology, Karma and Transformation: Inner Dimensions of the Birth Chart’ . It was with some relief we shifted to less controversial topics like Islamic extremism and freedom of speech.

Our conversation both missed my point entirely and reinforced it. Literary prizes are divisive and misleading. Their existence promotes not so much the joys of fiction and poetry as the horrors of literary prizes. You have only to look at the eligibility criteria for the Man Booker or the Baileys to understand how the prize culture perpetuates itself. In both cases, if your publishing house has had previous winners, you can submit more titles for consideration in subsequent years. According to figures compiled by The Guardian in 2014, if you have been a Man Booker judge, your chances of nomination increase significantly. Literary prizes have a tendency to swallow their own tails.

Does this matter? On the limited evidence I have assembled here, you might legitimately argue that it doesn’t, that the world of literary prizes is so closed, so arcane, that it can be ignored with impunity. But that argument quickly falls apart when you pause to consider the effect of longlists and shortlists on readers. Books which are listed for, or win, prizes are peddled furiously by their publishers and by booksellers. This feeds an idle, uncritical tendency in some readers who, bewildered by the array of books now available to them, in print or electronic format, plan their reading around prize lists. According to the Guardian piece to which I referred above, sales of prize-winning and listed books invariably enjoy massive increases and, although I doubt it would be possible to obtain anything more than anecdotal evidence for this, the increase is very likely at the expense of sales of books outside the golden circle created by the self-consuming serpent. The prize system manipulates readers in ways which can narrow their experience, limit their enjoyment and stunt their critical faculties. Surely, whatever goes on inside the circle, this fall-out is a troubling pollutant.

As a writer, and thus with at least a toe inside the circle, my discomfort also has other sources. Although prizes for generic fiction are less tainted in this way than others (but not, in my view, entirely untainted), looking at the big prize shortlists for 2014, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that they are trying to compare apples and pears. Exactly what can Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize, have in common with its fellow shortlistee, The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer? One is an account of the experience of prisoners of war on the Burma Railroad, the other the story of a mentally ill teenager in contemporary Britain. Flanagan is one of Australia’s foremost novelists, with a string of substantial successes behind him. Filer is a British newcomer. Likewise, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing shares hardly any points of comparison with Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, except that both are conventionally defined as novels and both were shortlisted for the Baileys Prize in 2014 (but not for the Man Booker. Evidence of continuing male bias? Or does the very existence of the Baileys mean that publishers don’t push books by women authors to the Man Booker judges?) McBride’s pared-down, almost pre-conscious voice also shares little or nothing with the mad, rococo exuberance of Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity, even though both appeared on the inaugural Folio Prize shortlist. (Do they breed, these prizes, in their foetid, incestuous golden circle?) It is, as far as I can see, utterly meaningless to lump a group of books together on the spurious basis that they are the ‘best’ novels published in a particular year.

At least the Costa has the decency to offer prizes in different categories: best novel, best first novel, best poetry book, best children’s book, best biography. In 2013, incidentally, Nathan Filer won the best first novel award. In 2014, Helen McDonald’s - admittedly utterly wonderful - H is for Hawk won both the Costa Best Biography and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Does literary incest raise its head again here? But I digress. The point I wanted to make is this. Having helpfully categorised its submissions for us, the Costa then goes on to pick, from its five incomparable and un-comparable winners, a Book of the Year! How? I, for one, have no idea.

My final, and most serious reservation about the culture of literary prizes is that it creates an unhealthy environment for writers. Yes, of course, the prize money and increased sales figures can transform the lives of winners by giving them a big enough financial cushion to pursue their craft without having to work in the local pub or (in my case, at one point) on a market stall. But this good fortune can also have the effect of setting writers against each other. It breeds resentment. I am not suggesting that writers, as a community, are any more or less prone to mealy-mouthed envy than any other group in which there is a hierarchy of reward. Bankers may be worse, clergy better. Or it could be the other way round. Writers, however, like all artists, but especially those who pursue a solitary creative process, live, I believe, with a particular precariousness and frailty. Up to a point, this may be a prerequisite for creativity. Beyond that point, however, it can induce creative paralysis and a crippling lack of self-esteem. If we are condemned to live and work in a world in which recognition is only granted to the golden - and perhaps quite random - few who win prizes, I do not believe most of us can function at our best.

Now,  I do not inhabit cloud cuckoo land. Like Sir Thomas More (reputation dismantled by the Man Booker-festooned Hilary Mantel), I may write about Utopia and still end up with my head cut off. I am fully aware that human beings are by nature competitive, and wouldn’t have achieved our domination of this planet if we weren’t. I doubt very much that any literary prize administrator happening across this article will be overcome by a bout of self-flagellation and call for the banishment of literary prizes. But a cat may look at a king, and every now and again it does the king no harm if she growls and flexes her claws a little.

Sarah Bower won a national children’s short story competition when she was nine. She blames her parents. She never would have entered the competition off her own bat. Oh no.