Vogel literary prize fails to find a winner

• by: Geordie Williamson
• From: The Australian
• May 01, 2013

• 

Author Rohan Wilson, winner of the 2011 The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award for The Roving Party. Picture: James Croucher Source: The Australian

JUDGES of literary prizes today occupy two increasingly incompatible roles. Think of a strip club spruiker wearing an academic gown and brandishing his rolled doctorate as he dutifully proclaims the pleasures to be had within, and you'll have a sense of the weird combination of hard-nosed marketing and aesthetic discrimination they are obliged to bring to the role.

It wasn't always like this. Look back at the early juries for the Man Booker Prize and you will encounter giants.
In 1971, for example, judges included Saul Bellow, John Fowles and Antonia Fraser, writers whose decision to award VS Naipaul for In a Free State presumably was based on a shared commitment to an older idea of literary achievement, "something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos", as Bellow once wrote, "an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction". Somewhere along the line, things changed: the distraction itself became the achievement.
The Man Booker became the most visible manifestation of a prize culture in which the publicity surrounding the award became more important than the books, and the sales generated by the award became the most important indicator of merit.


But, where Naipaul legitimately could gripe that his novels sold poorly during the 1970s, a younger author such as DBC Pierre could only look on in awe. His debut Vernon God Little saw sales rise almost 5000 per cent after winning the 2003 Booker Prize. Sales of Hilary Mantel's entire backlist doubled in the year after her win for Wolf Hall.

The pressure to award the prize to a book that will maximise sales is, then, increasingly strong.
When my former employer and Booker Prize judge, London bookseller Rick Gekoski, successfully argued for John Banville's novel The Sea to win in 2005, he was accosted by the head buyer of a chain of booksellers, furious he would be obliged to flog a highbrow experimental fiction.
Such are the larger currents that have swirled around my three-year stint as a judge of The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award. Yet it is a measure of how staunch the publisher behind the Vogel, Allen & Unwin, is in its own commitment to old-school literary excellence that I have barely felt the breath of these intense 
commercial imperatives.

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