I have a confession: I used to care about literary awards. A lot. I’d follow the Booker Prize longlist announcements the way some people follow the NFL draft. I’d read the National Book Award finalists every year, form opinions about who deserved to win, and feel genuinely aggrieved when the “wrong” book took the prize. This was before I worked in publishing. Before I understood how the sausage gets made.

Now I still follow the awards, but with a different set of eyes. I see the machinery behind the selections. I understand the politics, the economics, and the compromises that go into every shortlist. And while I still think literary awards do some good in the world, I’ve become skeptical about how much they actually tell us about the quality of the books they honor.

Let me back up. Literary awards have been around for over a century. The Nobel Prize in Literature was first awarded in 1901. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction started in 1918. The Booker Prize in 1969. The National Book Awards in 1950. These prizes were created, in theory, to identify and celebrate the best writing being produced. They were supposed to be meritocratic: a panel of qualified judges reads widely and selects the most deserving work. In practice, it’s never been that simple.

The first complication is that “best” is a subjective judgment, and the judges are human beings with tastes, biases, and blind spots. A Booker Prize jury of five people might include a novelist, a critic, an academic, a broadcaster, and a former politician. Their reading preferences, their politics, their idea of what literature should do, will all differ. The winning book is usually a compromise, the book that the most jurors could agree on, which is not the same as the book any one juror would have chosen on their own. Consensus tends to favor the unobjectionable over the bold. I’ve talked to former Booker jurors who admitted that their personal favorite didn’t win because they couldn’t persuade their fellow judges. The book that wins is often the second or third choice of most jurors rather than the first choice of any of them.

The second complication is that awards judges can only consider books they know about. This sounds obvious, but the implications are significant. For the major prizes, publishers submit books for consideration. A small press with a limited marketing budget might publish a brilliant novel that never reaches the judges’ attention because it wasn’t submitted, or was submitted too late, or arrived in a pile of 300 other books and got lost. The logistics of reading for a major prize are staggering. The Booker Prize typically considers 150 to 170 submissions. The judges have about six months to read them, which means reading roughly one book every day and a half. Under those conditions, some deserving books inevitably get short shrift.

Publisher lobbying is another factor that doesn’t get discussed enough. The major publishers invest significant resources in positioning their books for awards consideration. They send advance copies to jurors with carefully crafted notes. They take jurors out to lunch. They orchestrate review coverage timed to awards season. None of this is illegal or even unethical in the formal sense, but it creates an uneven playing field. A debut novel from an independent press is competing for attention against books backed by professional publicity campaigns. The playing field isn’t level, and pretending it is does a disservice to the smaller publishers and the authors they represent.

The commercial impact of winning a major literary prize is enormous and well-documented. Winning the Booker Prize typically increases a book’s sales by 500 to 1,000 percent. Even being longlisted can double or triple sales. For the Pulitzer, the effect is similar. A prize sticker on the cover is the single most powerful marketing tool in publishing, more effective than any review, any advertising campaign, or any celebrity endorsement. This commercial power is both the prize’s greatest strength and its most corrupting influence, because it means the stakes are high enough to invite gaming.

The diversity question has reshaped literary awards more than any other force in the last decade. For most of their history, the major prizes overwhelmingly honored white male authors writing in a realist tradition. The numbers are stark. Of the first 50 Booker Prize winners, the vast majority were white, and many came from a narrow band of Anglophone literary culture (British, Irish, Australian, South African, Canadian). The National Book Award has a similarly homogeneous history. This wasn’t an accident; it reflected the demographics of publishing, criticism, and academia, where the judges were drawn from.

In recent years, there’s been a conscious effort to diversify both the judging panels and the shortlists. The results have been dramatic. The Booker Prize has gone to authors from India, Nigeria, Scotland, Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka in recent years. The National Book Award has recognized a much broader range of voices and styles. The Pulitzer has expanded its scope to include graphic novels and genre-adjacent work. Whether you view this as a correction of historic injustice or as a dilution of standards depends entirely on your prior assumptions about what “literary merit” means, and who gets to define it.

I think the diversification has been largely positive, and I say that not as a political statement but as a literary one. The old prizes were drawing from an unnecessarily narrow pool. There’s no reason to believe that the best novel published in any given year is more likely to come from London than from Lagos, or from a professor than from a prison inmate. Expanding the pool of consideration doesn’t lower the bar. It widens the net. Some of the most exciting fiction I’ve read in the last five years has come from traditions that the old prize committees would never have considered.

That said, the overcorrection risk is real. There’s a version of prize culture where books are selected primarily for their identity politics rather than their literary accomplishment, where the author’s biography becomes more important than the work itself. I’ve seen shortlists that felt assembled for demographic balance rather than literary quality, and I don’t think that serves anyone, least of all the authors who deserve to be recognized for their writing rather than their identity. The ideal is a prize culture that considers a wide range of work on its merits, recognizing that “merits” includes formal innovation, emotional power, intellectual ambition, and cultural significance. We’re not there yet, but we’re closer than we were.

The proliferation of literary prizes is another trend worth examining. There are now thousands of literary awards worldwide, from the Nobel down to hyper-specific prizes for books about particular regions, themes, or demographics. The Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize, formerly the Baileys Prize) was created in 1996 because women were consistently underrepresented on the Booker shortlist. The Kirkus Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Hugo Awards for science fiction, the Edgar Awards for mystery: the list goes on. Each prize has its own criteria, its own judges, its own constituency.

This proliferation has diluted the impact of any individual prize while increasing the overall attention paid to literary fiction. A book can now be longlisted for the Booker, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, and win the Kirkus Prize, accumulating stickers on its cover like a frequent flyer collecting miles. Each recognition brings a bump in attention and sales. The cumulative effect can be substantial. But it also creates a kind of awards industrial complex, where publishers strategize about which prizes to target and position their books accordingly. The publishing calendar is now structured around awards season in a way that it wasn’t twenty years ago.

Self-published and independently published books remain largely excluded from major literary prizes, which is one of the most significant barriers remaining for those authors. Most major prizes require books to be published by a recognized press. Some have relaxed these requirements, but the bias persists. This means that the award system still functions as a validation mechanism for traditional publishing, which is convenient for traditional publishers and frustrating for everyone else. I’d like to see this change, but I’m not holding my breath. The prize committees and the publishing industry are deeply intertwined, and there’s little incentive for either to open the gates wider.

What do literary awards actually tell readers? I think they tell you that a book was good enough to survive a process of competitive evaluation by a small group of informed readers. That’s not nothing. It’s a signal, and for readers who are overwhelmed by the volume of new books published each year, it’s a useful one. But it’s not a guarantee of quality, and it’s certainly not a ranking. The winner of the Booker Prize is not objectively “better” than the shortlisted books or the longlisted books or the hundreds of books that were never submitted. It’s the book that a particular group of judges, in a particular year, under particular pressures, chose. Change the judges and you change the winner. This is true of every prize in every field.

I’ve come to think of literary awards the way I think of restaurant reviews: useful as a starting point but unreliable as a definitive judgment. A Michelin-starred restaurant is probably good, but it might not be to your taste. A Booker Prize winner is probably worth reading, but it might not be the book that changes your life. The books that have meant the most to me personally include zero prize winners. They’re books I stumbled onto through recommendations, bookstore browsing, or pure accident. The awards ecosystem is one way into good books, but it’s not the only way, and over-relying on it can narrow your reading in ways you don’t intend.

The future of literary awards is uncertain. The financial pressures on publishing are intensifying, which means the commercial importance of prizes is growing at the same time that public trust in institutional gatekeepers is declining. There’s a tension between the prize’s role as a commercial marketing tool and its stated mission as a cultural institution. You can’t serve both masters perfectly. A prize that always chooses commercially successful books will be accused of populism. A prize that always chooses obscure literary fiction will be accused of elitism. Most prizes oscillate between these poles, satisfying neither camp fully.

Social media and book-focused platforms like Bookstagram, BookTok, and Goodreads have created alternative influence channels that sometimes rival the awards in their commercial impact. A BookTok viral moment can sell more copies than a Pulitzer nomination. This parallel system of literary discovery is messy, algorithm-driven, and aesthetically different from the awards ecosystem, but it’s reaching readers that the traditional prize circuit never did. Young readers in particular are more likely to discover books through TikTok than through the National Book Award longlist. The awards committees know this, and some have responded by trying to make their selections more accessible and their announcements more social-media-friendly. Whether this represents adaptation or dilution depends on your perspective.

There’s also the question of genre. Most major literary prizes explicitly or implicitly exclude genre fiction: romance, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, horror. The assumption baked into this exclusion is that literary fiction is more worthy of recognition than genre fiction, which is a value judgment that I find increasingly hard to defend. The best science fiction published in a given year is often more intellectually ambitious than the literary fiction on the Booker longlist. The best mystery novels are often more tightly crafted. The best romance novels often have more emotional honesty. Restricting “serious” prizes to literary fiction impoverishes the conversation about what writing can do, and it means that a huge portion of what people actually read is excluded from institutional recognition.

Genre has its own awards, of course. The Hugo and Nebula for science fiction. The Edgar for mystery. The RITA (now renamed) for romance. But these awards operate within their communities and rarely break through to mainstream literary consciousness. The divide between “literary” and “genre” awards reinforces the broader cultural hierarchy that privileges one kind of storytelling over another, a hierarchy that most readers instinctively reject. Readers don’t care about categories. They care about good books.

I still follow the major literary prizes, and I still read the shortlisted books. But I no longer mistake the shortlist for a definitive statement about what’s best. It’s a starting point, a conversation opener. The real work of finding the books that matter to you, the books that will sit on your shelf for decades and change how you see the world, that work is yours to do. No committee can do it for you, however well-intentioned they are. The prizes light up certain books and leave others in shadow. Your job as a reader is to look in the shadows too.