This summer I was a juror for the category of Best magazine or periodical at British Fantasy Awards. I’ll admit that I signed up because I fancied a bit of free reading but when the magazines started to thump onto the doormat and pile up on my Kobo I panicked a little. But a quick reshuffle of the to-be-read stack, a woeful turning away of the podcasts I was now not going to get to listen to and a determined, never-go-anywhere-without-one-of-these-things-to-read attitude saw me get through all that reading on a deadline.
But soon I was back to my default position of utter pleasure at how lucky I was to be reading such great magazines (and feeling a little bit like I was getting away with something). I got the strong impression, from all the six shortlisted magazines, that the genre is thriving and becoming richly diverse in all sorts of ways.
I’m not always the easiest of audiences for short fiction. I find I often need a palate cleanser of a long narrative, or I’ll start to have the various universes of all those stories start to swirl in my head, all bleeding into each other and making a big mess. But these magazines had such a mix of thought provoking poetry, non fiction and criticism sprinkled among the high quality fiction that my mind was calmed. This, I thought, is like being in a perfectly curated museum full of my favourite things, and I like it very much.
Inevitably, I’ve been thinking a lot about the very idea of judging works against each other to award a prize. Competition is not always so compatible with the artistic life and perhaps the whole theory of deciding what is ‘best’ just doesn’t apply when thinking about something so intimate as the stories one holds near to the heart.
Of course, the controversy surrounding the awarding of the Booker prize last week has ignited a heated conversation about artistic prizes in general and literary awards in particular and I think this is healthy. We can acknowledge the paradox and cognitive dissonance of wishing that we didn’t live in world so consumed and defined by competition, knowing that we are far away from living in this kind of world and not having a clue what it would even look like if we did.
I have a sense that given different people, a different season or a different question, any panel of jurors might come to a completely different decision about the winner of any kind of prize; an alternate reality scenario where it’s just possible that by making the decision to reward one work over another, we might just have changed the fabric of time and created a new world.
That said, what prizes do very well is celebrate the health of an art form and get people talking about the books, genres and forms they have loved. When there’s so much airtime given in the media sphere to ideas that hurt, speech that divides and downright lies, it is so refreshing to see people come together to unashamedly gush about what they love and celebrate it with their community.
Congratulations to Uncanny and to all of the shortlisted magazines. And more than anything, thank you. You have all given me so many absorbed, happy hours of reading over the summer, and I know I’m not the only one.