http://www.calitreview.com/forum/ Just another bbPress community en Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:37:35 +0000 http://www.calitreview.com/forum/topic/literary-prizes#post-80 Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:39:55 +0000 Jem Bloomfield 80@http://www.calitreview.com/forum/ <p>I was just reading an article in "Prospect" magazine from a few months ago about literary prizes. I've only got a very limited perspective on this (I don't know how such things are managed in the US) but big fiction prizes like the Booker seem to occupy a sort of middle ground between the smaller, genre-specific prizes (like the CWA, or the Romance Authors awards, which sometimes have the air of an intra-industry private party) and the more obviously "artistic" events like the Turner Prize, which simply provides an opportunity for the tabloid papers to be self-righteously Philistine. I wonder what everyone thinks about literary prizes generally? Are they useful ways of recognising people who contribute to our language's cultural life and give a bit of publicity to struggling writers? Or are they a self-indulgent exercise in propping up the "literary novel" which otherwise would have quietly died because no-one actually wants to read it? </p>