FROM THE TIMES ONLINE

Orange Prize: let's have a rival

The answer to the women-only Orange Prize is a men-only version too
Given the existence of the Oscars, the Baftas, the Booker, the Pulitzers, the Costas, the Nibbies, the Grammys, all the various Nobels, the Turner prize, the Prix Goncourt, the Brits and the Golden Globes, to name a few, if you haven't managed to win some sort of prize by now, for something, then, let's be frank, you're a bit of a loser. In all senses of the word.

The publication today of contenders for the Orange Prize has inflamed controversy over whether women novelists need, for their own protection, to be penned into an arena where only writers with ovaries stand a chance of winning. Why not also a literary prize for which only bald novelists, or bisexuals, are eligible? Because that kind of discrimination wouldn't be politically correct?
But the answer is not to chastise the Orange for being condescending or discriminatory. After all, don't all prizes discriminate, if only in their selection of the judges whose subjective tastes determine who triumphs? No, the answer is to glorify such bias by creating yet more restricted-entry prizes. It is not just time there was a book award whose criteria firmly denied entry to any author of yet another depressing memoir of a miserable Irish childhood. Or one for novels so dreary they lull you to sleep faster than Alistair Darling's Budget speech. Or for fiction with a plot so far-fetched it makes the jaw-dropping shenanigans that incubated the current financial meltdown seem quite plausible by comparison.
Why not also launch a literary trophy for which only men are eligible, awarded to the sort of hairy-chested adventure stories that would make Ernest Hemingway and John Wayne purr? The Red Bull prize, perhaps.