I was well into adulthood before I learned that prestigious cultural awards are distributed not by some array of gods and muses but by real people. So when the Booker Prize Foundation released its longlist almost two weeks ago, I read it with pleasure, and I was struck by how prominently the award’s five judges featured in the announcement. There they are, most of them smiling beatifically in the photo on the Booker website and cradling two stacks of books, the proud result of months of curatorial labor and, presumably, high-minded sparring and arm-twisting.
Literary judges often take the brunt of critiques about prize giving in the arts, what with their inherent biases, their inescapable blind spots and the cliquish nature of the process by which they anoint winners. It’s easy to snipe at their qualifications and choices. Judges are the ultimate gatekeepers, a 21st-century taboo personified. But at a moment when chatbot guidance is intruding into every endeavor, I was glad to see these living, breathing humans pictured along with their selections. The subjectivity is the point.
I’ve adjudicated several awards and prizes through the years, and the dynamics around a judging table — the wild range of reactions to prose style, the tactics of persuasion, the parsing of emotional impact — are as human as the work in front of us. It’s not unusual for a judge to bang a fist on the table and storm out of a room (or, during those wretched Covid years, exit the Zoom). It’s also possible to incept a notion and change another judge’s mind. Some judging panels enjoy consensus from the outset, but it’s more common to navigate through conflict. Often where we landed wasn’t where we thought we were headed, which was part of the fun.
In a world where, apparently, fewer people read anything, those of us who still read a lot rely on literary prizes to assist with short-term discovery and long-term predictive power. Prizes are the original recommendation engine — except the deciders are tasked with consulting their own taste, not some algorithmic projection.
This year’s judging chair for the Booker Prize is the classicist Mary Beard, perfectly cast as an authority figure during a summer when all anyone wants to talk about is “The Odyssey.” Her fellow judges include the poet Raymond Antrobus, the musician Jarvis Cocker, the poet and memoirist Patricia Lockwood and the editor and critic Rebecca Liu. I don’t know any of them personally. I don’t yet know the Venn diagram between my sensibility and theirs, and I haven’t yet read any of the novels on the longlist, but I am happier than ever to take a flyer and find out.
Modern prize culture has existed for about 125 years; James F. English, in his excellent book “The Economy of Prestige,” dates the current craze for literary awards to the Nobel Prize, which debuted in 1901. In the Anglophone world, that timing happens to coincide roughly with the rise of English literature departments and, together, universities and awards like the Pulitzer, the National Book Awards and the Booker have become engines of canonization.
Universities canonize works by adopting them into curriculums, ensuring that generations of students will read them. (Scholars who assemble anthologies often do this work literally, binding poems, plays, fiction and essays into textbook editions.) Prizes canonize works and authors by setting them above their contemporaries, increasing the chances that when the literary detritus of the present is washed away, a few standouts will remain.
Since we can’t read all the books all the time, it’s helpful to have some guidance, however flawed, as to what’s most worthy of our sustained attention. That’s where prizes come in. Awards possess the power to attract immediate attention, both from their selections and from their scandals. (Nearly seven years ago the Booker caused a furor by shirking its bylaws and shruggingly handing out a tie.) But they also hold institutional sway.
Prizes have become especially important if you believe that our society has reached a postliterate stage, in which fewer students are majoring in English literature and almost no one in college can read full books anymore. If academic canons calcify and special interest groups continue to target works deemed controversial or unaligned with their worldviews, it will become harder for new books to be anointed through an educational pipeline. The recently published K-12 required-reading syllabus for Texas public schools, which in its high school years includes no books published in the past half-century, offers a glimpse of what that looks like.
I don’t mean to say readers shouldn’t abide by the suggestions of their trusted critic or columnist, family bibliophile, Substacker or BookToker. As a society, we do not lack for individual opinions about books, and many of those opinions are reliable. So by all means, take recommendations from me and Dua Lipa.
But I put extra store in prizes’ ability to affect and encourage collective reading because so much of their value, albeit unseen, comes from the collective act of judging — discussing, debating, deciding — and the subsequent broadcasting and coverage of those choices. When effort is made to put together a group of judges with diverse backgrounds and artistic experience, it shows in the output.
This year’s Booker Prize committee is admirably idiosyncratic, and so is the longlist it selected. I’ve had a soft spot for the Booker since the halcyon late 1980s and early ’90s wins for Kazuo Ishiguro, A.S. Byatt, Peter Carey and J.M. Coetzee. More recently, last year’s longlist led me and my book club to “Seascraper,” a small but mighty novel by Benjamin Wood about the hopes and dreams of an English shrimp catcher. I am 100 percent certain I would not have bought that book had it not been cited by the Booker judges, and I’m as grateful to them as if they had given it to me directly.
Imagine if the Television Academy ditched its broad-based secret balloting and instead just invited Mike White, Shonda Rhimes, Taylor Sheridan, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Bowen Yang into a room to duke it out over best drama. I would absolutely watch whatever winning show they told me to watch — the quirkier, the better.
As the trend lines for reading descend — and time spent scrolling, viewing, favoriting and following goes up — I take heart in the willingness of individuals to keep seeking the magical connection that imaginative literature can provide. Sometimes the connection is private, and sometimes it’s shared with other readers, but either way, it’s inherently personal. Awards, with their rare power to grant credibility in a cacophonous world and their equal capacity to provoke conversation, remind us that subjectivity is part of the risk and value of consuming art.
Maybe 50 years from now, no one will read literary fiction anymore, and nearly 200 years of canonizing energy — the effort to whittle down our mad surfeit of books into a working library that is, if not manageable, then at least comprehensible — will have been spent in vain. But if anybody still wants to pick up a novel after the deluge, I predict these Booker longlists and shortlists, along with those of the Pulitzers, the National Book Awards and other prizes subject to human whim and discretion, will provide essential signposts.
Like the books they recognize, these lists convey something crucial about the imperfect, unpredictable world we live in. They’ll be evidence of the brief, shining period when a handful of creative people would — by choice! — spend the better part of a year buried in books, deploying their time and taste in support of the ones they hoped other people would read.
Radhika Jones is a former editor in chief of Vanity Fair and previously served as the editorial director of books at The Times. She is at work on a memoir, “Bookish,” and writes a newsletter on literature and culture.
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