What Prize list do you respect / follow?

Aside from the Booker, I look at the Travel Book Awards and that's about it.

I think we may get a UK / US divide here (Booker / Pulitizer)

1969: P. H. Newby Something to Answer For

1970: Bernice Rubens The Elected Member

1971: V.S. Naipaul In a Free State

1972: John Berger G

1973: J.G. Farrell Siege of Krishnapur

1974: Stanley Middleton Holiday

1975: Nadine Gordimer The Conversationalist and Ruth Prower Jhabvala Heat and Dust

1976: David Storey Saville

1977: Paul Scott Staying On

1978: Iris Murdoch The Sea, The Sea

1979: Penelope Fitzgerald Offshore

1980: William Golding Rites of Passage

1981: Salman Rushdie Midnight's Children

1982: Thomas Keneally Schindler's Ark

1983: J.M. Coetzee Life and Times of Michael K.

1984: Anita Brookner Hotel Du Lac

1985: Keri Hulme Bone People

1986: Kingsley Amis The Old Devils

1987: Penelope Lively Moon Tiger

1988: Peter Carey Oscar and Lucinda

1989: Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day

1990: A.S. Byatt Possession

1991: Ben Okri The Famished Road

1992: Michael Ondaatje The English Patient and Barry Unsworth Sacred Hunger

1993: Roddy Doyle Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

1994: James Kelman How Little It Was, How Late

1995: Pat Barker The Ghost Road

1996: Graham Swift Last Orders

1997: Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things

1998: Ian McEwan Amsterdam

1999: J.M. Coetzee Disgrace

2000: Margaret Atwood The Blind Assassin

2001: Peter Carey True History of the Kelly Gang

2002: Yann Martel Life of Pi

2003: D.B.C. Pierre Vernon God Little

and here are the national book award winners. i was surprised by how many i had read on here! and how much good stuff is on it. but there is your us/uk divide. i've read dozens of books on the NBA list and no doubt on the pulitzer list as well, but i haven't read ANYTHING on the Booker list. sad isn't it? i did buy Possession a while back and i'm kinda looking forward to that.

And I was just going to post that I've had good results from reading Whitbread Prize winners (like the terrific 'English Passengers' by Matthew Kneale which I just finished. It beat 'White Teeth to win the Whitbread)

but as far as fiction goes it seems to be the one that follows a lot of the book threads on ile: a lot of faves for ilxors are on there.

Myself, I tend to trust the book awards not at all; even the National Book Award committee, recently, seems always to agree with the trade publications. (The Shipping News? _Really_?) The short-story awards tend to be somewhat more useful, just because the idea, there, is to provide a _selection_ of praiseworthy stories, all of which are likely to have been read by the editors (whose names are often right there on the collection cover, for better or worse, whether Oates or Elkin or Wideman). This way a number of different criteria can be applied, and the stories can be taken on their own terms. On the other hand, any prize offered to merely a single book is all too likely to be influenced by the implied politics of the choice, leading to selections of books that very neatly fit the "specifications" of an award-winning book. While this can lead to true classics being chosen, it's more or equally likely to pander to moralistic or salvationist treacle.

As far as I can tell, the book awards have been chugging along on their own steam, with very little relevance to quality (above a certain measure of literacy/canniness), and will continue to do so. It shouldn't really be a point of bitterness, as long as one understands that winning one of the major awards is a boon akin to winning a lottery, not winning a footrace.

M.

Here's a link to a site with lots and lots of links to literary award sites: Literature Awards.

The James Joyce Award: a roll call of titans

From the little I could glean from the wikipedia article, it appears that the James Joyce prize is awarded by a society of university students, whose callow judgment is well-reflected in the list of recipients.