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Apparently it’s now terribly unfashionable to be a winner. At last week’s Turner prize, the nominees got together and declared that none of them wanted to win. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Tai Shani and Oscar Murillo wrote to the prize organisers to say they wanted to make a “collective statement” at a time when there was “already so much that divides and isolates people and communities”. The £40,000 prize money was split equally between them.
This is turning into something of a trend. In August, when Olivia Laing, author of debut novel Crudo, won the James Tait Black prize for fiction, she announced in her winning speech that she was sharing the £10,000 with her fellow nominees because “competition has no place in art”. In October, Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo were jointly awarded the £50,000 Booker prize even though the organisers had explicitly told the judging panel that they were not allowed to choose two winners. The Bad Sex in Fiction award was also shared between Didier Decoin and John Harvey because “there was no separating the winners”. (Which, weirdly enough, sounds like the definition of good sex to me but never mind.)
For anyone who has ever judged these kinds of prizes, these reactions are mind-numbingly infuriating. Because you battle with exactly these ideas of fairness as soon as you start to consider a potential winner. And if you can’t get past this inherent flaw in the business of prizegiving – that there can only be one winner – then frankly you can’t be involved on any level and you should absent yourself from the process, whether as a judge, nominee or fan.
In the past year, I’ve been on the judging panel of the Wellcome prize (winner: Murmur by Will Eaves), a prize where novelists are pitted against nonfiction writers; and of the David Cohen prize (winner: Edna O’Brien), the “other Nobel”, which celebrates the lifetime literary achievement of an individual. I’m now reading dozens of novels in preparation for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction. In every judging meeting on any prize the same hesitations arise. It’s never easy or obvious. Thousands of hours are spent in evaluating the nominees in quiet, private contemplation and then in face-to-face meetings with other judges who are occasionally argumentative and grumpy. (Guilty.)
For all that well-intentioned evaluation to end in a split result is the definition of pointless. When prizes are divided, they become less about celebrating achievement and more about questioning the validity of prizes.
The awarding of prizes is often unfair. But, guess what, so is life. Art and imagination may be infinite. But our attention is, unfortunately, finite. We cannot physically give our attention to every single artwork, every single book or every single piece of music. Prize-winners help to define, for good or ill, where attention has coalesced in a given moment.
Others then have a chance to debate and evaluate this choice. Did the judges do a good job? Or are they idiots? Have they chosen someone or something we can all appreciate? Who did they overlook? In a divided society, these are the amicable, intelligent cultural conversations that have the potential to draw us together. These are the conversations that matter more than ever right now.
If we share everything and celebrate everyone, then we end up rewarding no one and nothing. And where is the fun in that? Where is the recognition of excellence and of the blood, sweat and toil of the individual? Where’s the suspense, the drama, the unexpected inspiration, the reason to pop a champagne cork?
I can understand those artists, writers and activists who refuse completely to be celebrated. Jean-Paul Sartre turned down the Nobel prize. Marlon Brando spurned his Oscar for The Godfather. This year Greta Thunberg declined a £40,000 Nordic Council prize because “the climate movement does not need any more awards”. If you want to be left alone to do your work and shun applause and praise, that is absolutely your right. But to want to have the cake, eat it and then make sure that the cake is shared around and declare that it’s only right that everyone has a few crumbs… well, it diminishes the cake. And when cake is diminished, we are all diminished. Accept the painful truth. There can only be one winner.
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