Writers have to be careful of prizes — careful of thinking about them, or not thinking about them. Sitting down to write, one needs one’s head clear of all the apparatus of vanity and status anxiety and self-doubt that may clutter it the rest of the time. No one who’s any good puts words on the page to win prizes: good writers aim at something much bigger and more difficult. And yet prizes do change the literary landscape — they draw writing habits and patterns and fashions inexorably after them. It goes without saying that they are a bit of a blunt instrument: getting it right sometimes, wrong sometimes, not fine-tuned to the taste of every discriminating reader. But they help sell books, and we all need books sold. They provide a kind of seasonal sport which keeps fiction in the public eye and the public mind. They lend a public, monumental dimension to careers carved out in the intimately private forms of fiction. It’s hard to imagine our literary world now without the prizes lending it their outward shape.
Which is why it would be so good to have another prize for a short story collection. At the moment there’s only the valiant Edge Hill prize, which hasn’t caught the public imagination — probably because it’s attached to a university and not to a corporate sponsor with money to spend on publicity. Colm Toibin, Claire Keegan, Helen Simpson and Nail Gaiman are among past winners of the Edge Hill, which gives some measure of the order of contemporary achievement in the short form. There are a number of prizes for individual short stories — the BBC and Sunday Times have national prestige (and now there’s a new Costa prize too). These are unequivocally a good thing — but by their nature they don’t quite set in motion the heavy machinery of publishing and book sales. They reward the writer and no doubt help to nudge some new careers (the BBC prize has radio broadcast to offer too). But a prize to reward a whole collection could even tip reading tastes and buying habits. Outward public forms really can influence the inward life of writing: the lending practice at Mudie’s library made Victorian novelists publish in three volumes; serialization changed the shape of Dickens’ thought; classy literary periodicals funded by well-heeled universities ensure that the short form thrives in America. Prizes are blunt instruments; but a prize well set up, with thoughtful judges, could help all those British readers who think they don’t like short stories to discover that they like them after all.
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