The strange truth about literary prizes and the impossibility of judging a book: dispatches from the front

Erica Wagner has judged the Booker, Wellcome Book Prize and Women's Prize — but says the process is more complicated than it seems

It can be a challenge, when January finally chugs round, to escape an avalanche of potential avenues for self-improvement, one of which is inevitably to stop scrolling and to read more books. I am, essentially, a Professional Reader, and yet this remains a perennial resolution of mine. One way to guarantee you’ll read more, of course, is to judge a literary prize.

Now: it absolutely does not do to complain about judging book prizes. Oh, woe is me! I am positively buried under a pile of novels and some of them I may not enjoy! No. This is not roadmending. It’s a privilege to judge a literary prize — and over the years, I’ve judged a few. There was the Forward Prize (poetry), The Women’s Prize (it was called the Orange Prize when I judged it), the late lamented Costa Prize (which was then called the Whitbread). The Wellcome Book Prize (which seems to be on pause, a real shame) and the Booker Prize, not once but twice. And the Goldsmiths Prize, once as judge and once as chair.

There’s no ignoring the significance of prizes to the literary ecosystem. Winning any prize usually provides a huge boost to the author’s sales and publisher’s fortunes. When Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize; the novel sold more than 25,000 copies in the week following the announcement in the UK alone — a 1,900% increase on the week before. Books by Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021, could be found on hardly any American shelves before his win; in the following year over 26,000 copies of his books were sold. Annie Ernaux won the Nobel in 2022: without that victory, would The Years have been adapted into the acclaimed drama due to open at the end of this month in London’s West End? I very much doubt it.

Currently, I am a judge of the 2025 Wingate Literary Prize — our longlist, of seven non-fiction titles and seven novels, was announced at the end of last year, and our shortlist is coming very soon — and the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, for young, as-yet-unpublished writers. So there is a case to be made for me knowing my onions.

This steel engraving of Whitman served as the frontispiece to the first edition of Leaves of Grass

Or perhaps I don’t, and that’s the point of this piece. Judging literary merit is an extremely unstraightforward and problematic proposition: this, of course, is not a secret. When Wuthering Heights was published in 1847, the Athenaeum called it ‘a disagreeable story’. And when Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass came out in 1855, the London Critic said that ‘Walt Whitman is as unacquainted with art, as a hog is with mathematics’. The list of embarrassments is endless, and always entertaining to look back on. It allows us wise folk to chide those fools of the past who had not the perspicacity to comprehend the wonders put before them.