The future of the UK’s premier non-fiction prize is assured – for another five years at least – as the Samuel Johnson prize announces a new sponsor. The new era brings a new name, with the retitling of the prize in honour of the investment firm that has stumped up the cash. The Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction has also announced a new ambition – to break America and become “the leading non-fiction book prize in the world”.
It’s the first sign that literary prizes can still attract big money after a year of sponsorship drought, with both the Folio and Impac awards also announcing earlier this year that they were searching for new backers.
Though some might jibe at the cheapening of a prize whose name – after the great 18th century writer and lexicographer – honoured the enlightened desire of its first sponsors to remain anonymous, it’s worth reflecting on the value of keeping it going at all. A major award can transform the life of a writer lucky enough to win one. Just listen to the delight and surprise in Andrew McMillan’s voice as he tries to come to terms with winning the Guardian first book award.
Much of the value of a book award lays in the creative freedom the money buys for writers. When the Irish novelist Kevin Barry bagged the Impac in 2013, he summed up what a prize means by explaining that it “buys you a lot of time to be sitting at your desk, inventing deranged little worlds”. “It allows you to keep going,” Barry went on. “That’s the definition of success for a writer.” Aminatta Forna welcomed her unexpected Windham-Campbell award by saying the £90,000 award offered “what we most crave … time to write, free from deadlines, financial pressures, the expectations of others”.
But in a literary world increasingly divided between the haves and the have-nots, literary awards could be seen as part of the problem, sucking the life out of the midlist by focusing attention on a tiny fraction of the new titles published each year. Prizes may generate column inches for beleaguered publishers, but do they generate the sales that writers depend on to keep sitting at that desk?
“The short answer is yes,” says Nielsen Bookscan’s Andre Breedt. “They definitely boost sales for the books that are nominated and the books that win. And these are often books that most people won’t have heard of.” But whether the increase in profile that a prize can offer brings people into bookshops and creates new sales, or simply directs the attention of habitual book buyers towards a lucky few, is difficult to discern. “It depends what you mean by ‘new’ sales,” Breedt says. “Obviously there are book buyers who hear about books they otherwise wouldn’t, but the data can’t show whether they would have bought another book instead.”
It’s difficult to imagine what literary culture would look like without the constant merry-go-round of laureates and losers, but as the newly minted Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction attests, there’s no sign the carousel will be stopping any time soon.
- As a reader, what do literary prizes mean to you? Do you seek out award winning books or do you not care? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
