The truth about big literary prizes, and why smart glasses are coming for us all
Issue #2: With Erica Wagner and Matt Muir
I’m in a writing group that’s based in Los Angeles. We meet every week on Sunday, on Zoom, a disparate gathering of people united in our care for the written word — though some of us write prose, some screenplays, some poetry. We started during the pandemic: remember those days? Perhaps we wondered, as life returned to normal (normal!), whether we’d carry on. But we did, week after week, month after month, year after year. Now, when one of us visits a city others live in, there are genuine get-togethers: and genuine, deep friendships. We all started off knowing one or two people in the group. Now, we are a gang of pals, a community.
Our group messages, right now, have a different tenor. They are full of love, but also of fear, as some of us are in flight from a city in flames. Friends’ houses burn to ash. Smoke hangs everywhere. We are frightened for our friends’ children. We don’t know what the future holds. These are times when words feel inadequate and yet words are so much of what we have, to express our care, to offer connection, to say: I will listen.
No pair of glasses is smart enough to offer a solution to what awaits us. ‘Just wait til we all have the internet strapped to our faces for nine hours a day,’ tech journalist Matt Muir writes; we’ll see how that goes, eh? Yet there’s no going back, of course. There’s only finding a better way to go forward. And the only way we can do this is in community, real community, in kindness and care. We’re glad you’re here with us as we bring Boundless into the world. We hope you feel that you belong here, too.
Erica Wagner
Editor-at-Large
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.
Are smart glasses the future?
'Your phone is dead, it just hasn’t quite realised it yet,' says tech journalist Matt Muir
The dream of ‘smart glasses’ died its first death on April 28th 2013, when the US technology evangelist, influencer and ‘personality’, Robert Scoble, shared a photograph he’d taken of himself, in the shower, all pink and sudsy. Scoble – who is famous for adopting all and every technological advance with wild fervour – had previously promised that he would never take off his glasses and the shower pic was offered as proof. Google Glass, who had released the product some months previously, never really recovered from the stench of uncool that Scoble bestowed upon them, and production of the product ceased three years later in January 2015.
But that was merely a single battle in a technological war — smart glasses retreated but they’ve never really gone away. Although, admittedly, they’ve never really quite taken off either. Since 2016, Snap (the parent company of the teen messaging app Snapchat) has sold several iterations of branded sunglasses that can also shoot photos and videos, which can be uploaded to social media; these tended to be limited edition drops and were never intended as mass-adoption devices. In short they were a bit of a PR stunt.
However, there is a new frontier, as the big beasts of Silicon Valley are starting to bet big on ocular devices once more.
Robin: Erithacus rubecula
Robins sing all winter but also sing at night when they are often mistaken for Nightingales. Some people think the 1940 song, ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, was actually inspired by a Robin.
Jim Moir's More Birds was recently published by Unbound