In Prize and Prejudice, at Foreign Policy, Diane Mehta wonders: 'Do international book awards dilute world literature ?' (via).
The piece takes in a lot of the recent debates -- though it does a poor job of noting the difference between author- and book-prizes. And the casual mention that: "Some elite international prizes accept translations" seems also rather misleading: as far as book prizes go, very few do -- beyond the 'best foreign/translated book'-prizes that many countries/languages have. Even an ostensibly international-friendly prize like the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award restricts entries to books available in English; the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature appears to be one of the few (the only ?) prize that places no restriction on what language a book was written -- or is available ! -- in (though logistics obviously favor books at least translated into one of the widely-read European languages).
The piece takes in a lot of the recent debates -- though it does a poor job of noting the difference between author- and book-prizes. And the casual mention that: "Some elite international prizes accept translations" seems also rather misleading: as far as book prizes go, very few do -- beyond the 'best foreign/translated book'-prizes that many countries/languages have. Even an ostensibly international-friendly prize like the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award restricts entries to books available in English; the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature appears to be one of the few (the only ?) prize that places no restriction on what language a book was written -- or is available ! -- in (though logistics obviously favor books at least translated into one of the widely-read European languages).