Podcast: Talking About Awards With Critical Friends

It seems that my life recently has been revolving around literary awards. The deadline to vote for the Hugo is in a few hours, I wrote a very scathing review of this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and I've been named as a juror for next year's Otherwise Award. It's only fitting, therefore, that I guest on this week's episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, to talk about the purpose, effect, and nature of literary awards. Host Dan Hartland invited myself, in the wake of my review of Daniel Kraus's Angel Down, and Amritesh Mukherjee, whose review of Tashan Mehta's Mad Sisters of Esi just preceded the book being named on the shortlist of the Ursula K. Le Guin Award, to discuss the thorny subject.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, and of course there have been quite a number of award-based controversies in recent years. And it's interesting to wonder how much of that is an increasing democratization of who's writing about books online, all of that stuff, coming up against the kind of more traditional, quote-unquote, "elitism" of the very idea of juried awards.

So Abigail mentioned the Hugo, which of course is a relatively popular vote, right? I say relatively because the number of people that vote for it is different each year and it's not huge, but it's a great deal larger than your traditional juried award. Do we have thoughts on that? Amritesh talks about the process of an award; do we have thoughts on whether juried awards are better, whether popular awards are better, what we might go to each of those different types of award for? What role the three wise people on a panel in the world of BookTok?

Abigail Nussbaum: To bring us back to what Amritesh was saying about the Commonwealth Award—which we know was quite shocking, that whole situation—it occurs to me that there's a difference between an award you argue with and an award you distrust.

I'm gonna do something really unexpected and make a sports metaphor, but we're in the middle of the World Cup, so: If you're a fan of a team, then maybe you hate the coach and you hate the player and you believe very strongly that you could win the game much better than any of them could, but you're still a fan of the team.

And at some point—this doesn't happen with football fans I believe, but with other pursuits—at some point an organization like that, even if you argue with it, it can lose your trust completely.

So if you look, for example, at the Clarke Award this year, a lot of people are arguing with it mainly because of Dungeon Crawler Carl. But for the most part, I don't think that there is loss of trust in the award. There's people saying you have let down the award, or simply I disagree with you. And my response to the Pulitzer as well: I don't think that there was any underhand funny business going on there; I think that the jury and the board and I have very different taste and I disagree with theirs.

That doesn't mean I have tremendous trust in the Pulitzer. It's not the first literary award I turn to, but it's not an award I distrust. And at some point, if you make enough bad decisions and if you make enough bad decisions for the wrong reasons, then the award loses trust and then it becomes useless.

And that was of course the danger, if we’re going to bring this back to the Hugos, that was a danger with the Sad and Rabid Puppies. They brought the award into disrepute. That was the danger with the Chengdu shenanigans where votes were thrown out. That also brought the award into disrepute. And that is much more important to me in the end than whether I agree with the decisions that the award makes.

I often don't agree with the decisions that the Hugo makes, but I trust it to reflect a group of people whose tastes often do not coincide with mine. To bring this back to your question, I think the question isn't "is a juried award better, is a popular vote award better?" The question is, do you feel that you get this award, that you trust it, and that you understand the kind of books that it is likely to recommend to you?

And I look to the Hugo for different books than I look to the Clarke. And in recent years, I look to the Clarke more. I find the books that the Clarke shortlists more interesting. But I still value the Hugos' existence and its input. So to me it’s not a matter of which one of them is better, it's a matter of understanding them and being able to trust them.
As ever, I had a lovely time appearing on Critical Friends. It remains one of the few genre podcasts that talks not just about the state of the field, but about the state of the conversation about the field. You can find the episode (and the podcast in general) on all podcast platforms, or on the Strange Horizons website, where there is also a transcript of the episode.

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