Book Prizes Don't Work How You Think: A Judge's Perspective
As a judge for major awards like the Pulitzer and National Book Award, I've learned that the process is far more personal than people assume. Small groups of judges with idiosyncratic tastes decide winners, often reading hundreds of books in months. If a single judge doesn't connect with your work early on, it rarely advances, regardless of its quality or your reputation. The outcome depends entirely on the specific alchemy of the panel, not organizational bias.
Someone's life would have been changed, but just barely wasn't. Someone out there is wondering if it's all worth it, never knowing that judges fell madly in love with their work and were gutted not to be able to highlight it.
- culi
Pretty interesting post. I guess I'm surprised that it's just like 5 people doing most of it and the most complex structure is still just 2 stages usually (Pulitzer: 5 judges send 3 books to a special council to pick a winner). It makes me think you probably get as much value from following a few specific critics as you would from following these prizes
I wonder how the reviewers feel when authors like Ursula K. Le Guin refuse awards
- imzadi
I've read for screenwriting contests and it is pretty much the same thing. During the first round of reading, they usually expect you to read a minimum number of pages (usually 20 pages). Only one person will read your script during the first round, so if it doesn't catch their attention you will be cut. During the subsequent rounds you are generally expected to read the whole thing, but most of the worst stuff has already been eliminated. In some contests you can see the coverage from previous judges and some you can't. It all depends.
- ofalkaed
Related read; a first hand account by one of the 2012 Pulitzer jury members giving a good account of the process and attempting to explain why no literature prize was awarded that year.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/letter-from-the-...
- m463
Sorry, I laughed... :)
> I’ve judged prizes both pre-2020, when we were sent stacks of books, and post-2020, when everything had switched to zip drives and online databases.
Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 megabytes (MB), then 250 MB, and finally 750 MB. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
- arjie
Haha, very interesting. I hadn't thought about the mechanics of it all but from the title I suspected it might be something like this. There's no objective measure after all of what a good book is. It's not bad for the process. The top few universally seem pretty good.
I have noticed that the Hugo Awards appear to have declined somewhat in quality. The Murderbot series is enjoyable, yes, but it's a winner just like Dune and I think that's odd. Perhaps it's my tastes that are changing or my tastes are stagnating and the world is evolving. Ah well.
Oh and, about the cronyism angle in literary prizes, I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Nobel_Prize_in_Literature is a good read. They picked members of their own academy that year and eventually one of the winners killed himself (perhaps over it).