Literary Prizes: From a skull-and-crossbones teapot to pots of money, the prizes were stacked high for writers in 2003. Rosita Boland takes a selective look at who won what.
Literary prizes come in many forms, and some of them are wonderfully imaginative and odd. If you win an Agatha, an American prize for a book in the Agatha Christie "mystery of manners" genre, you win a teapot emblazoned with a skull and crossbones. The Bram Stoker, an international horror prize, is an eight-inch replica of a haunted house, the door of which opens to reveal a brass plaque engraved with the name of the winning work and its author. London's Literary Review sponsors the infamous Bad Sex in Fiction Award, for which the prize is a box of cigars - with no prize for guessing why.
Token prizes like these are becoming rare in the book trade. There has been much hoopla over the past decade or so about increasingly large monetary prizes for literature. Nobody would ever dispute money is a good thing for a writer, but the large sums currently on offer for some prizes - plus the advent of public longlists - have had the effect of turning some of them into a media circus. There is a danger of certain prizes becoming more and more about the sponsors and the money and less about the books and those who write them.
By refreshing contrast, the prize-money for the Prix Goncourt, France's most famous literary prize, is only €10 - yet it's the prize every French writer wants to win, as the award is so prestigious, and it leads to huge sales.
Happily, literary prizes can still arouse controversy for good reasons, as happened again this year.
In Britain, in November, first-time novelist Hari Kunzru refused to accept the prestigious £5,000 John Llewellyn Rhys award. Kunzru said "no prize" because the award is sponsored jointly by the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, newspapers which, Kunzru stated, "pursue an editorial policy of vilifying and demonising refugees and asylum-seekers". Kunzru's father is Indian, his mother is English. He asked for his prize money to be donated to the Refugee Council, which the newspapers agreed to do. Kunzru is shortlisted for the forthcoming Whitbread First Novel Prize for his book, The Impressionist, and has already made an estimated £1 million from it.
There was more controversy on the other side of the Atlantic, also in November. The American National Book Awards have proved to be a true litmus test of a writer's enduring reputation, won by every major American writer from William Faulkner to Norman Mailer. This year, the fiction prize was won by Shirley Hazzard for The Great Fire; Carlos Eire won the non-fiction prize for Waiting for Snow in Havana; C.K. Williams got the poetry accolade for Singing; and Polly Horvath won in the children's section for The Canning Season. They got €10,000 each.
However, it was the award given to popular thriller writer Stephen King, the 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which exercised the writers. In a spat, fellow award-winner Hazzard told the Associated Press news agency that she doubted the merits of giving a commercially popular writer such a prize, adding that she personally had never read any of his books.
In his acceptance speech at the awards ceremony, King was equally cutting. He specifically addressed those members of the literary community "who make a point of pride in saying they have never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer". King thundered on: "Do you think you get social/academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?" Hazzard pointedly did not join in the standing ovation.
So who else won what, and how much, this year? The Man Booker, worth £50,000, went to first-time Australian-Mexican novelist Peter Finlay, aka D.B.C. Pierre, for Vernon God Little. The author , currently living in Co Leitrim, announced that he'd use the money to pay off some of the £150,00 debts he'd run up in his colourful days of cocaine-using and gambling. Those creditors could be in luck three times over, as he is also shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize.The award-winners in all the categories of the Whitbread will be announced on January 7th, while the overall winner will be announced on the 27th of next month .
Robert Macfarlane won the £10,000 Guardian First Book Award, with Mountains of the Mind. The book is a personal and cultural history of mountains and high-altitude climbing - exceptionally personal. Macfarlane left parts of three frostbitten fingers behind him on one mountain after he had to cut them off himself with a penknife.
South African novelist John Maxwell Coetzee won the biggest prize of all: the annual Nobel Prize for Literature, for his life's work, picking up a cheque for a cool $1.3 million.
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award of €100,000 (in pre-euro days, it was £100,000) went to Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, for My Name is Red.
The 2002 £25,000 Whitbread Book of the Year went to Claire Tomalin for her biography, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self. Other category winners, who each won £5,000 were: Norman Lebrecht, for his first novel, The Song of Names; Michael Frayn, for his novel, Spies; poet Paul Farley, for his collection, The Ice Age; and Hilary McKay, for her children's novel, Saffy's Angel.
The £30,000 Orange Prize for Fiction, which is, slightly bizarrely in this, the 21st century, for female writers only, went to Valerie Martin for Property.
Jeffrey Eugenides, whose first novel, The Virgin Suicides, became a successful film, won the $7,500 Pulitzer Prize for Literature for his second novel, Middlesex.
Irish poet Paul Muldoon won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry with his collection, Moy Sand and Gravel. Fellow Irish poet Ciaran Carson won the £10,000 Forward Prize for his collection, Breaking News. English poet Alice Oswald took the T.S. Eliot Prize, also worth £10,000, for her book-length poem, Dart.
Eight-time novelist Jenny Diski turned to travel writing in Stranger on a Train, a book about her train journeys across the US. Her diversification was rewarded when she won the £10,000 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.
Another non-fiction prize, the £30,000 Samuel Johnson Prize for biography, went to T.J. Binyon, for his Pushkin: A Biography.
During Listowel Writers' Week, the €10,000 Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award went to William Trevor for The Story of Lucy Gault. A more recent literary prize on the Irish scene is the jointly sponsored Hughes and Hughes/Sunday Independent Irish Novel of the Year. This year, Colum McCann collected the €7,000 award for his novel, Dancer, when the prize was announced earlier this month.
Aside from the Whitbread, in children's literature, the American Newbery Medal went to the mono-named Avi, for Crispin, The Cross of Lead. The other famous American children's prize is the Caldecott Medal, which went to Eric Rohmann, who wrote and illustrated My Friend Rabbit. Closer to home, the Bisto Book of the Year Award was shared between Kate Thompson, for The Alchemist's Apprentice, and Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick's You, Me and the Big Blue Sea.
And the famous €10 Prix Goncourt - celebrating its centenary this year - went to La Maîtresse de Brecht by Jacques-Pierre Amette. The winner was unexpectedly announced a fortnight early, apparently specifically to upstage two other major French literature prizes, due to be announced prior to the Goncourt. Which were? The Prix Femina went to the Chinese writer and film-maker, Dai Sijie, for Le Complexe de Di, while the Prix Médici went to Hubert Mingarelli for his novel, Quatre Soldats.
But if the people who run the Prix Goncourt have their way, the French won't remember who won those two particular prizes this year.