Awards for women, writers of colour, small presses – why are there so many books prizes?

Nuanced stories: top row, books by Preti Taneja, Eley Williams and David Hayden shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness prize; bottom row, Jhalak prize-listed titles by Reni Eddo-Lodge, Kayo Chingonyi and Nadeem Aslam — Nuanced stories: *top row*, books by Preti Taneja, Eley Williams and David Hayden shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness prize; *bottom row*, Jhalak prize-listed titles by Reni Eddo-Lodge, Kayo Chingonyi and Nadeem Aslam Composite: PR

How many literary prizes are there in the UK today? To Wikipedia’s tally of around 70, I can immediately add half a dozen more – and still they come. It doesn’t seem too much of an exaggeration to see them as an industry in their own right, involving flotillas of administrators, squads of judges and hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in prize money.

The value of this industry has long been hotly debated, with some writers going so far as to maintain that having so many prizes deforms the literary culture. The Man Booker prize, in particular, has been charged with dictating the sort of novel that is thought to be worth publishing and promoting, thereby influencing the books authors have felt compelled to write over the last 50 years.

But shortlists this week from two of the newest awards – both in their second years – tell a more nuanced story. Both were set up in reaction to the status quo by writers with a mission. The Jhalak prize seeks the book of the year from “a writer of colour”, while the Republic of Consciousness prize has set its sights on rewarding the smallest of small publishers, those with no more than five full-time employees.

The shortlists these niche prizes have produced are instructively different. Jhalak’s includes four novels, a poetry collection and a polemic. Of the novelists, three have previously been nominated for major awards. Nadeem Aslam has been a Booker longlistee and Xiaolu Guo a Baileys prize shortlistee, while children’s writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s second novel, The Island at the End of Everything, was shortlisted for both the Costa children’s prize and the Blue Peter awards last year. Kayo Chingonyi’s debut collection Kumukanda also comes hotfoot from its shortlisting for last year’s Costa poetry book of the year.

Not exactly outsiders, then, but the history of corrective prizes – the Goldsmiths for experimental fiction or the Folio, for instance, both of which were set up to counter existing awards – is that they tend to cluster around the same writers, if not the same books (Goldsmiths and Baileys both anointed Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, while the inaugural Folio prize went to George Saunders, who went on to bag the Booker, when it faced down the Folio challenge to finally admit Americans).

An incidental USP of Jhalak – as of the relaunched Folio – is that its given criteria enables it to build bridges across genres. I would particularly love to listen in to a discussion of Reni Eddo-Lodge’s nonfiction polemic Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race alongside When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, by one of fiction’s most fiery and unclassifiable polemicists, Meena Kandasamy. In important – if not strictly literary – ways, they belong together.

This year’s shortlist for the Republic of Consciousness prize for small presses suggests that eligibility by scale at the point of production may actually turn out more radical results. I’m not ashamed to admit that I am only familiar with one of the six shortlisted books: Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (a sprawling improvisation on the theme of King Lear that could equally have been in contention for the Jhalak), but that’s partly because, small staff notwithstanding, Galley Beggar Press established itself as a big-hitter when it discovered Eimear McBride.

The strength of the Republic of Consciousness prize is that it pits translated and non-translated books against each other, thus sidestepping all the usual arguments about translation and authorship, while reflecting one of the great achievements of small presses in the Brexit era – to keep faith with an international literature whose value will never be measurable in pounds taken at the tills.

So I will make a point of seeking out Noémi Lefebvre’s Blue Self-Portrait and Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love, and making the acquaintance of their publishers, respectively Les Fugitives and Charco Press. And any publisher called Dostoyevsky Wannabe, frankly, has to be worth a ticket to Manchester, which – along with Sheffield and Norwich – is becoming a soul city of micropublishing.