On Literary Contests
My Bookstore Book Nook, a gift from my daughter Jocelyn and assembled by my husband Doug
Saskatchewan Book Awards’ recent announcement that Grounds for Murder is a finalist for its fiction award got me thinking about literary contests. While they can be a mixed blessing, they are important to writers. And I am grateful for their existence.
The downside is that there are winners and losers. In my short career as a writer, I entered two previous contests--both for unpublished first novels. The first submission went nowhere, which wasn’t surprising. The novel wasn’t good and was never published. My second submission, two or three years ago, was Grounds for Murder. It wasn’t even longlisted. The jurors’ report was mixed. One of them said it was ready for publication, one said it was not ready for publication, and the third said something in-between.
My point here is not that I was unjustly passed over for the award. (Subsequent publication has assuaged any residual hurt feelings!) Rather, it is that there are no clear, objective criteria for literary excellence. Such objective criteria, in fact, does not—and cannot—exist.
A few years ago, I was a judge for a popular Canadian literary contest. I read thirty-five novels. In my opinion, some of them were absolute rubbish. Some of them were okay, but nothing special. And some of them—nine or ten of the submissions— were very good. My two fellow judges and I shortlisted the top five novels and then chose the best of the five. Did we agree on our choices? Of course not! And so, our decisions were a compromise.
It's virtually impossible to establish objective criteria because our responses to literature are based partly upon personal taste. Some people enjoy and admire novels that I dislike or find boring; who is to say which of us is “right”? As writers, our only choice is to enter a variety of competitions and hope that sometimes the judges are sympathetic to our work.
Literary honours are important to us not just for affirmations and cash prizes, but also for the publicity they provide. Book awards boost sales and readership. We need both if we are to survive.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the outcome of the SK Book Awards competition. But I’m also using the situation as an impetus to read more work by fellow Saskatchewan writers. The other three works shortlisted for best fiction are I Think We’ve Been Here Before by Suzy Krause, A Simple Carpenter by Dave Margoshes, and The Beech Forest by Marlis Wesseler. I’ve ordered copies of them from the Saskatchewan Library System. You could do the same!
