Author Zadie Smith attacks literary prizes

By Nicole Martin, writing in The Telegraph, London

Zadie Smith, the award-winning author, has launched a blistering attack on literary prizes.
The writer, who has received awards for her novels White Teeth and On Beauty, said that most literary prizes were "only nominally" about literature.

"They are really about brand consolidation for beer companies, phone companies, coffee companies and even frozen food companies," she said on the website of the Willesden Herald, a forum of the arts.
Her criticisms were attacked as hypocritical by senior publishing figures, who questioned why she had agreed to accept awards for her books.
In 2000, she won the Whitbread First Novel award for White Teeth while in 2006 she received the Orange Prize for Fiction for On Beauty.

Ion Trewin, the organiser of the Man Booker prizes, told the Sunday Times: "Why has she been happy to accept money from these prizes and sponsors, who she now attacks?"

Smith, the chairman of the Willesden Herald's short story competition, also said that she and the other judges had decided not to award a prize this year because no entry was good enough.
"Just because this prize has the words Willesden and Zadie hovering by it, does not mean that I or the other judges want to read hundreds of jolly stories of multicultural life on the streets of north London," she said.