Most Australian authors and publishers would deny that they are as divided as the Americans. They conveniently see the Australian book world as monolithic – maybe a nugget-size monolith, but one without cracks and fissures. This view, however, does not account for the begrudging that goes on when Tom Keneally or even David Ireland wins a big literary prize. I’ve heard it said that these are awards for the ‘meritocracy’ – meaning that the awards recognise the contribution Keneally and Ireland make to the bookselling business, rather than the books’ merits.

Who should receive literary awards? The struggling author, getting a token cheque and mostly moral support? The author who has proved his importance, getting a laurel and a token of appreciation that really amounts to something? If the prize comes from the publishers’ purse, as the new TABA prizes do, is it not equivalent to a Christmas bonus from a grateful employer to a productive worker?

American authors grew anxious about the message implicit in the reconstructed TABA awards. Prizes once supposedly based on the acumen of select judges, each of whom was qualified as a writer (in the NEA awards), were transformed into prizes awarded by popular acclamation. In the name of democracy, TABA winners were chosen by an electorate of 2000 – approximately 500 votes went to publishers, 500 to booksellers, 500 to librarians, and 500 to authors and critics. The TABA organisers’ argument was that even the best judges are inclined to be indecisive – just as in Australia the Miles Franklin judges were split recently. But no matter how close the vote in a popularity poll, a Colin Roderick is only one vote in a large minority. Being right is confused with having the numbers on one’s side.

The debates about TABA have raised questions which the Australian Society of Authors and other groups have raised in the past. Unless a judge is only one of many who are ticking boxes on a ballot sheet, the job of judging is an onerous one. Should judges be paid? –if not, how can the best possible judges be attracted to the work? If so, doesn’t the judge become an employee of whoever is sponsoring the prize?

Should the judges be announced before entries are accepted? – if so, don’t their images in authors’ minds determine the kind of writing that will be submitted? If not, aren’t writers’ competitions being run with an air of mystery that musicians and visual artists would not accept in their own competitions?

Should the deliberations of the judges be reported so that we can weigh the justice of their first choice against the other possible choices? Where different genres compete for one award, should the judges admit to liking novels more than plays, for example? In other words, should the hand of God be taken out of the prize business so that we can better study the machinations of men?

Most importantly, the American Book Awards raise the question of how self­sustaining literary competitions should be. The Association of American Publishers charged twenty-five dollars for each book entered in TABA. The cost amounted to thousands of dollars for most publishers, some of whom could afford it less than others. Of course, authors would protest vociferously if ‘for a measly $25’ their publishers had denied them a chance at the big stake. So the new cost itself was another wedge in the rift through the book business.

There is generally no argument how much winners should get; most competitions offer between $2000 and $15,000 in prize money, and I have never heard an author protest that this is inequitable. However, in Australia and in most other countries there are dozens, or even hundreds, of literary competitions where prizes total less than $500. These competitions attract authors who are not earning any income at all from writing. In fact, a $100 first prize for a thumb-soiled short story may be all the money that winner ever earns from story-writing. The publicity he gets is minimal and the windfall so small, what’s the point?

These small prizes survive because there is an enormous satisfaction in distributing them. The morale of the selection committee is boosted, not the morale of the author. Any author who interprets such a prize as a mark of his promise runs the risk of raising false hopes. He runs an even greater risk if he is towed along by the expectations of his family and friends. A prize does not define a man’s talent. Even a small award may be too persuasive a determinant of the direction an immature writer takes.

An award which comes at exactly the right moment in an author’s career is a good thing, but a glance through some lists of prize-winners suggests that novelists are likely to get their first award for the book that follows their first big success. If judges mean to stimulate the public’s interest in an author, they are often too late.

Prizes which go to ‘half good’ books are maybe more constructive than those for successful books. The argument is that it’s more important that all intelligent readers are drawn to good authors than that the fringes of the reading population are drawn to the best authors. For this reason, apparently, Patrick White withdrew himself as a nominee for the Booker Prize in England and for the Miles Franklin award here.

Whether a book prize increases the readership at all, among either of those classes of readers, is debatable. Certainly, none of the Australian prizes appear to do so. Publishers here regard the awards as nice for the author’s sake but immaterial in the book market. Both Thea Astley and David Ireland, multiple winners of the Miles Franklin, are skeptical whether it has done anything for their incomes. According to the British Bookseller, the Booker Prize is the only one which does affect British sales – approximately doubling them (which means an increase of anywhere between 2000 and 10,000 copies sold). French book awards, on the other hand, are noted for increasing sales by a hundredfold (from 5000, say, to 500,000). Is this difference of influence strictly a cultural one, or are the prizes structured differently? Most American and Australian awards, unlike the French ones, are primarily morale boosting. The focus is not on what the prize does for the book but what the prize does for the author. The lionising of an author, the splash of champagne where only hours before in the editorial office there were budgets and furrowed brows, and the air of having something to celebrate are the important ingredients. As John Irving says in his New York Times piece, these silly parties are necessary, but if we need silly parties – well, maybe, then we should just have silly parties, not prizes.

The other type of prize-giving involves an even more elaborate party, but it is on the pontifical level of the Academy Awards. It is the accolade that’s important, not the bonhomie between authors and publishers. If the other sort of party shows an exuberance for literary merit, this sort of ‘laying on of hands’ ceremony is a blessing for the heirs of the business rather than for quirky talent. What worried American authors was the origin of the TABA awards in the industry itself. These awards, they thought, couldn’t fail to be self­congratulatory. It was for this reason that the British counterpart of our Writers Guild awards (AWGIEs) came to an end: they seemed tautological, like thank-yous twice expressed.

The prediction is that, as publishing houses become simply arms of corporations whose products are promoted aggressively, book authors too will be promoted through more ‘show biz’ prize-giving presentations. But there is still a great difference in Australia between the National Book Council’s annual presentations and the fashion industry’s Lyrebird Awards at the Opera House.

The number of literary awards in Australia is large and most are fairly administered. Because Australian authors belong to the English-speaking literary world, there are chances for Booker and TABA prizes too. The only serious restriction on writers is that most Australian competitions insist that entries must have a local flavour – a parochialism that, were it a condition of the Pulitzer Prize in the United States, for example, might have disqualified many Pulitzer winners including Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth and Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

One factor in the fair administration of literary competitions is the temporariness of the judges’ appointments. Most Australian book awards are decided by a rotating or an ad hoc committee – the exception being Miles Franklin trustees who judge that prize. Perhaps literary prizes are incorruptible here because they are so uninfluential. Perhaps in the backs of our minds we believe that the business of prizes is taken too seriously in America and England. Isn’t it just a lottery? Isn’t it just good fun?

In England the Arts Council has stepped into prize-giving – it’s hardly a giant step from the giving of grants. However, in the Arts Council’s first attempt last April, their awards caused a stir equal to the TABA fracas. First, the size of the Arts Councils awards (government) was set so as to outrank the size of the Booker awards (private enterprise) –three Arts Council awards of £7500 each, compared to Booker’s one at £10,000. Second, the winner of one of the £7500 prizes, the historian Hugh Thomas, knocked back his award because it was pillaged from taxpayers. ln the past, money from the government usually has been regarded as clean money compared to prizes from the tainted profits of business or the patronage from a popular writer whose success has enabled him to make a bequest. Thomas’s action added a new dimension to the tricky problem of finding proper sponsors for purely literary awards.

I doubt whether the solution is to do away with literary awards. Although I’d like to see many of the smaller awards consolidated so that they have more impact on writers’ lives and readers’ choices, I think we still need a galaxy of prizes, a great number of author­promoting parties, and sponsors of all taints. In fact, we need these because we need to pay attention to a wider range of books. What about a prize like the Lamont Poetry Selection, sponsored by the American Academy of Poets, for which only a poet’s second book is eligible (a prize designed, in other words, to lift poets over the disappointment of having sold only 300 copies of their first book). What about a prize in cooperation with another country, like the Seal Novel Award which gives $50,000 to a first novel by a Canadian and is sponsored by six publishers, a hardback and a paperback publisher in England, and the United States as well as in Canada. What about a prize for the best book of non-fiction published by a university press? Or what about a simple exercise like the annual Pushcart Prizes in the United States, where each year the best articles and stories from small magazines get a second cheque and republication in a hardback anthology?

In addition to running its own prize system, the Literature Panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain also tops up the prize money in nine existing awards. Perhaps there should be a category of application to our own Literature Board, seeking matching funds for prize monies in book categories where prizes are needed. The Literature Board does sponsor the Children’s Book Awards each July, but since this is a comparatively lucrative field of Australian publishing these awards might find other sponsors if the Literature Board were to gradually back out. The point is to keep open the forum which the winning of prizes provides, and to keep it lively.

Literary prizes mark out the peaks of talent, they don’t describe the terrain. But it is by the peaks that we judge ourselves as a literary nation. I am reminded of a remark of Ambrose Bierce’s that ‘literature is not like a game of billiards, in which the players are rated according to their averages. In estimating the relative altitudes of mountain peaks, we look no lower than their summits.’