The next time they nominate me for the Nobel Prize for literature, I’m turning the numskulls down. Here’s why:
I don’t believe in a hierarchy of works of art, literature, or music. I only believe in wavelengths. When a song or story is on your wavelength, you feel it; otherwise, you don’t. Books that win awards have simply happened to be on the wavelength of whoever’s judging. Why pretend otherwise?
To win doesn’t make a book better than any other. Nor does being shortlisted, or longlisted. Festoon a book cover with awards and accolades, and it won’t make a teensy jot of a difference to a reader who picks the thing up and discovers it not to be on her wavelength.
Awards are marketing. Thanks to the internet, none of us knows their arsehole from their elbow anymore, so books need a way to “cut through the chatter”. Granted, we live in a world where humanity requires marketing, so, fine. I grumpily concede the awards’ right to exist. But don’t photoshop haloes around them and cue the chorus of ahhing angels.
For an author, what’s a literary award for? Why, to go into your fifty-word bio, that’s what.
Dale Stromberg has won the Golden Doorstop Award and the Bookshop Unitmovers Award, and has been longlisted twice for the Wordsnoot Prize. He lives in Malaysia with two cats and wrote this bio himself.
What’s the purpose of all those medals hanging on the literary lion’s chest? That’s simple: Status. Hierarchy. The boo-yah pleasure of making anybody who hasn’t got a prize feel smaller. A key to the clubhouse door. Plumage. Instead of taking pride in being what you are—an artist helping to create the literary element of the culture that sustains us all—now you can strut about with corded epaulettes on your shoulder and feel like big stuff.
God, I hate that shit.
Full disclosure: I feel so free to denounce the awards industrial complex precisely because I am in no danger ever of winning one. I have always known, down in my very bones, that the grownups would never like me. Now, at middle age, I’m older than some of the grownups, the snot-nosed big-city kids chairing awards panels, and I shall continue to age faster than the world until I gingerly step, awardless, into my coffin. Good! For the remainder of my fleeting interim, I’ll be anti-awards, anti-prizes, anti-contests—a brave posture that costs me nothing but is a fine consolation.
But I insist that it’s not merely about the consolation. I care more about art, literature, and music themselves than I do about the world’s tinfoil vanities. My blood gets itchy anytime I confront foolishness, and literary awards feel foolish. I’m old enough (and hence stuck-in-the-muck enough) to aver that, if I got nominated for something fancy tomorrow, I’d turn it down, and feel better about that than I would about winning.