Literary Prizes - Which do you take seriously?
 

There are a bewildering array of literary prizes out there. Just about every writer's organisation/newspaper/magazine presents their own version of 'Book of the Year' based on different criteria. Examples include:

The Man Booker Prize awarded to contemporary fiction from authors in the UK/Commonwealth. The books are read not once, but several times during the judging process, so it takes a certain type of book to succeed.

The US has the Pulizer

Getting more genre specific, SF has various awards including the Hugo, the Nebula and Arthur C Clarke awards.

Fantasy has The World Fantasy Awards

Horror has The Bram Stoker Awards.

In the UK, crime writers are awarded 'daggers'.

Children's fiction is awarded with the Carnagie Medal

I could go on for some time, but you get the gist. Which awards (if any) do you take seriously when considering books to read?

Erm, I don´t know any of those, the only writers award I know is the dutch Gouden Griffel. But I don´t really believe in those kind of awards, just a jurry telling you which books are good and which aren´t seems a bit silly to me. Of course it´s a nice token of apreciation to the writers anyway.

Hugo is generally good enough, and of the more mainstreamish ones, I like Booker.

Hugo and Nebula are almost always of a high standard.

Hugo, Nebula, and The World Fantasy Awards are all good for me :D

World Fantasy Award tends to reward good books and I've even read some of them. Nebula and Hugo books are also usually good. But then again I'm biased as a Bujold fan. :)

Finland has Finlandia book prize for contemporary books, Finlandia Junior for children's books and Tieto-Finlandia prize for non-fiction books.

One speculative fiction book has so far won the Finlandia prize: Johanna Sinisalo's Troll: A Love Story.

Literary Prizes - Which do you take seriously?

Any that they give me :D

And the SFFWORLD Award For Fantasy and the SFFWORLD Award For Science Fiction...

When I have convinced DAG to run them ;)

Will they be awarded as voted by members? or by staff?

Dude, I made the awards up like... 2 and a bit hours ago, but hey, if they were real, I would say a combination of both. Members nominate in the first instance and a top ten is then judged by a panel, which may be made up of members, staff and invited industry types like some of the authors who show up here or people who work in the industry.

Can I be president?

America also has the National Book Award, which I find sometimes more reliable than the Pulitzer.....guess it depends who's judging that year.
The Booker and Hugo Awards are pretty important to me.

Just like the oscars, I don't pay any attention to literary awards. I don't appreciate people telling me which books are good, because they usuallly get given to some useless book which I will never read. I prefer to read the blurb, and then see if that interests me. Then maybe the first page... then I might keep going. Maybe...

If I could only count the number of books I have put down a few hundred pages into them... ;)

[QUOTE=Gregorius_H]Just like the oscars, I don't pay any attention to literary awards. I don't appreciate people telling me which books are good, because they usuallly get given to some useless book which I will never read. [QUOTE]

Exactly my point! Lots of books with lots of awards i had to read at school, and often I thought they were worhtless. Yet many books without any awards i love.

A literary prize gets my attention, but it doesn't guarantee a buy, or even a good read (for me).

Some of the prize-winning books are just too literary -- they're writer's books, not reader's books.

I've had good experiences with the Booker award, the National Book Award, and the Giller -- it's Canadian.

I've liked some Edgar winners too -- American mysteries.

I like National Book Award, various US Young Adult awards, Carnegie, Booker, Pulitzer, Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, PKDick, Newberry...heck if I notice that a book has won an award of any kind, I take a second look, but don't necessarily buy it.

Caldecott recognizes the best illustrations in children's books. Past winners have been Where the Wild Things Are and The Snowy Day. I trust them.

I like the James Triptree Jr Award... because when I grow up, I wanna write just like James Triptree Jr.

Australia has the Aurealis Awards and the Ditmars for sf, f and h.

Quite strange - in Germany there are quite some literary prizes, but the moment you ask me about them, I am totally blank.

Thinking a bit about it, here are some:
Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels - given each year at the beginning of the Frankfurt Book Fair; noted everywhere in Germany and surely by booksellers but never felt like it had a big effect on book-buyers.

Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis - German Literature award for YA fiction - has different categories for YA, for children's fiction, for non-fiction etc. This one always did have an effect not only for those that one but sometimes also for those nominated; for me it is quite important at the moment since I am more or less working in that field

Kurd Laßwitz Preis - this one is for SF with both best book and best foreign book (among the winners were Connie Willis and China Mieville and lots of others) and has also categories like best movie or best translator; I like to check this one, especially the translations . . .

There are really quite some more, but those were the most important to me right now.

Other awards do have effects in Germany or are at least noted: the Nobel Prize for Literature for sure. And then also the Booker prize since German publishers have the translations of the winners, so . . .

I personally like to follow the nominations and winners of most genre fiction awards (Hugo, Nebula, PKD, Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, Lambda), the Booker prize and the Whitbread Award. Did not know about the National Book Award until some month ago when it was discussed on the bookangst101 blog.

So, yes, I am interested in literary prizes. I hardly manage to keep up but I like to see books I read and liked being nominated and I like to try out winners . . . I am so easily influenced by press, media and hype. ;)

Oh-oh, and not to forget the Locus Awards! (Apropos, I think the poll is up on the Locus site.)

Something that just came to my mind: is there a site, that keeps track of most literary prizes (to simplify: UK/US awards and international ones) so that one could just go there to see every current developement?

You know, a site for lazy people like me that like simple solutions to questions that sometimes arise. ;)

Locus has a site that is pretty comprehensive for SF/F/H. Link here: http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/index.html

If a book gets an hugo/nebula/WFA nomination it usually goes on my tbr list, and award winners get bumped up in the queue. So far i've found the WFA to be of more consistant quality than the others, but they go to my favourite authors quite often, so i'm biased.

In terms of general fiction, the only awards i pay attention to are the Booker, and Nobel prize (although only interested in the novelists, Nobel prize has the habit of going to poets and playwrights, not my cup of tea.)

As Juzz says, for winning I'd like any/all of them. For reading.....it's a bit different :D.

Carnegie (and I think Smarties??) are big recommendations as far as childrens books are concerned, imo.

WHSmith's awards are usually good.

Booker prize winners tend to be too high-brow and.....trying too hard to be clever to actually be good.....but there's usually some good stuff on the short list. Pulizer (can NOT spell that) seems pretty cool.

Whitbread I seem to recall is pretty well regarded too.

Yobmod, thanks. :) I already knew the Locus site, I am looking for non-genre fiction awards. A site like the one from locus for all the other fiction awards, now that would be something. ;)


High-brow? You think?
I haven't read that many Booker prize winners, but just think about The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro - what a beautiful and great book. Or Life of Pi by Martel. I would not call either of them high-brow (in a negatice way).

But then, tried once to read Coetzee's Disgrace. Urg. And The English Patient wasn't bad but I wasn't too impressed.

You are surely right about the good stuff on the short-list: Salman Rushdie's Moor's Last Sigh, Waters' Fingersmith (hey, how often have I mentioned her now. And better yet, in what other ways can I mention and promote her? ;) )

Since reading Life of Pi I decided to take a closer look at the Booker prize winners. So both the winners from 2004 (Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty) and 2003 (D.B.C. Pierre - Vernon God Little) are in my to-read-pile.
And I also have taken some interest in other short-list books: Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo, David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas and Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake.

Ah well, it's stupid. I have too many books in my to-read-pile anyway. I really should ignore awards. ;)

2005 sees the first time Man Booker International Prize - it is not for works but for authors and will be rewarded every two years. Open to every nationality but the author's work has to be available in English.

Mmh . . .

the Whitbread award i respect and Pulizer

(never never never the smarties book award an award named after and sponsored by childrens chocholate i am sorry doesn't hold much credibility with me!!!)

Hrm, Whitbread is "a leading restaurants and leisure company" (with investment in Pizza Hut) and it was founded as a beer brewery. Looking at it that way does it hold that much credibility?
MAN as the name-giver and sponsor of the Booker prize doesn't really impress me either.

Not to forget that the Nestlé (which owns half of the world's food producing companies anyway ;) ) Smarties "prize is administered by Booktrust, an independent charity which promotes books and reading" . . .

*shrugs* Just thought this should be thrown in.

[quotes taken from the wikipedia]


The Pulitzer for fiction 2005 went to Gilead by Marilynne Robinson - generally I am not so interested in this award but since I saw it in the bookstore today: did anyone read it or heard anything about it?


And I just found an award I think I will watch out for from now on. ;) It's the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. :D

I've started to follow the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis of Klagenfurt the last years.
It's a good forum for new authors.
Georg Klein got the award two years past and he's most likely the best German narrator at the moment.
I don't know if his books are translated in English but I know that "Libidissi", my favorite novel at the moment, got translated in Italy, so there's a chance.
His writing reminded me of China Mieville in some aspects, but there are some Kafkaesk elements as well.
If you ever have the chance, read him, he's really different and special.
The story is takes place in a country and a city which you almost recognize, somewhere in Africa or Near east, you get the feeling like the name is on the tip of your tongue, but it's purely fictional.
It's about an old spy who shall be replaced (=killed) by his successor, a strange pair of males, because he got corrupted by the CITY: "Libidissi".
They search for him and he tries to evade them, we get to know strange characters, religious sects, people get killed, they meet but don't recognize each other until it comes to an grizzly showdown.
He's one of very few German authors who can actually tell a story and use fresh language as well.
Symptomatic for the literary climate at the moment is, that he was writing for twenty years before this novel was published.
Publishers didn't want it because it was to strange, and didn't fit into a category.
Right after publication he won the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis so that tells something.
At a discussion one of the literary critics asked: Your book hasn't much to do with "reality"?
And he laconically answered: No, it doesn't.;)

I do check out the Booker Prize. I think the main American awards are Pulitzer and National Book Award, which I also glance at. But mainly Booker.

As for SF/Fantasy, I do check Hugo/Nebula/Locus/World Fantasy/Mythopoeic, but as always I do so for ideas and just out of general curiosity in what people like rather than doing it because it's a well-established recommendation machine for me ( it often isn't ).

Personally I don't think any of these awards can tell an idividual what books they will like. Just my opinion though.