Literary Prize Culture

As signifiers of literary value and taste, influencers of the literary canon, and indicators of distinction, literary prizes have played, and continue to play, an extremely important role in the promotion and celebration of literature. Far from being novel embellishments to an author’s career or book’s reputation, literary prizes have in fact become central components to the production, promotion, and longevity of literature in popular culture. They can increase book sales and print runs, heighten exposure and publicity, and consecrate an author’s place within literary canons. They are their own industry in and of themselves, their success dependent on many factors and agents including authors, publishers, booksellers, prize administrators, judges, and journalists. Literary prize scholarship is an ever-expanding, interdisciplinary field. Scholars have examined literary prizes in relation to cultural economics, sociology, linguistics, gender studies, postcolonial theory, book history, and publishing studies. However, when considering the impact of literary prize culture, it is important to remember that they are structured upon imperfect processes of judgment and selection. Yet, despite their limitations, literary prizes endure as one of the most captivating, dynamic and unique phenomena in literary and publishing culture. It is important for scholars to continue to interrogate literary prizes as a cultural phenomenon, in order to acquire a full understanding of the true impact they have on literary and publishing culture.

Prize Culture and Diversity in British Children's Literature

Literary prizes often determine eligibility in terms of nationality; this article posits that they also play a significant role in constructing national literatures. An analysis of the Carnegie Medal, the UK's oldest children's book award, and some of its competitors, including the Guardian Prize and Other Award demonstrates the tension between the desire to claim cultural value for children's literature and to construct a body of literature that represents the real and imagined community of the nation. In the UK, this tension appears most notably with regard to depictions of Black, Asian and minority ethnic Britons.

Accommodating the Mess: The Politics of Appropriation in It for Others (2013)

In response to Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s collaborative meditation on art and colonialism in Statues Also Die (1953), Duncan Campbell’s video installation It for Others (2013) takes a complex approach to presenting a Marxist criticism of the commoditization of art and culture. This article considers the intermedial and intertextual properties of It for Others as an example of convergence culture that transcends postmodern quotation and pastiche. While the film is apparently a bricolage of visual artefacts, it is in fact an intricately woven audiovisual essay concerned with the appropriation of not only colonized objects as its narration makes clear, but also of still images, moving images, written texts, sound samples, and the labour that produced them. The article examines how the film troubles notions of documentary realism and truth through its acts of appropriation that reflexively criticize the commercial appropriation and commoditization of artworks and histories. It also reflects on the film’s Marxist approach to related issues around authorship, ownership and access to artworks, particularly in the light of the film’s acknowledgement in prize culture.

Literary prize culture

This chapter considers the colonial heritage of the main literary prizes specific to African writing in French in the post-war period, awarded by the Association nationale desécrivains de la mer et de l’outre-mer (ANEMOM). It demonstrates how the ANEMOM gradually adapted to the changing political and cultural context of decolonization during the vingt glorieuses and examines how it sought to preserve certain aspects of France’s colonial imaginary by consecrating the ‘Empire de la langue française’.