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Novelist Zadie Smith offended literary aspirants by declaring that she and the other judges found no entries worthy of the 2008 Willesden Herald Short Story Prize.
Giosue Carducci, Henrik Pontoppidan, Giorgos Seferis, and Sully Prudhomme each won a Nobel gong for literature; Tolstoy, Borges, and Ibsen did not.
Zadie Smith's defense of high standards recalls V. S. Naipaul's tactic, when judging a weak field in a literary contest at Makerere University. He awarded only one prize, and called it Third Prize. Were the 850 Willesden entries really so bad? Having been spared reading them, I cannot know. What I do know is that prizes matter more than they should, and if their intent is to encourage good writing, incentivize greatness, and give bad writers kicks in the pants, then Smith's haughty dismissal has accomplished more than any actual prize would have.
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