Inside judging one of the big literary prizes: searching for sinister outside forces, table banging and some gems of books

Irish Times

19-05-2025

Last summer I was asked to be a judge for the
Nero Fiction Award
. Would I like to read 70-odd novels by Irish and UK writers and confer with two other judges to decide what was, according to us, 2024's Nero-Fiction-Award-worthy book?
I considered it an honour. Also, my curiosity was piqued. Judging a fiction prize would give me a chance to see what actually goes down at those legendary tables of disputation where literary careers are made or broken. Would one of the other judges steamroll the rest of us into giving the prize to an unpopular and frankly rubbish book? Would the steamroller-in-chief be me? Would sinister outside forces lean on us to ensure that we made the 'right' choice? Would I be able to read 70 novels in four months?
As it turned out, there was no steamrolling, and no outside influences of any kind. My fellow judges – Dr Will Smith, a former academic who now runs the Sam Reed bookshop in the Lake District, and Zoe West, literary editor of Women's Weekly and Woman and Home – were civility itself. We argued for our favourites. Nobody shouted or banged the table. Our eventual choices were accepted without question. Writers love to complain that literary awards committees are black boxes of partisan conspiracy. I am, in a way, sorry to disappoint.
It also turned out that I didn't actually have to read 70 novels in four months. When the books themselves arrived at my house in giant boxes, I had regrets. All that print! All those slaughtered trees! My precious spare time! But a friend who had judged a major literary award a few years ago let me in on a trade secret: 'You read until the book disqualifies itself.' This became my guiding principle – and incidentally, I recommend it to all readers at all times.
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What interested me about reading for the Nero was the chance to survey a large cross-section of contemporary novels, all published in the same year and in the same geographical region. Not a complete panoptic overview of the novel in 2024, but as close as anyone is likely to get.
The Nero Award is a good idea. It seeks out books that are primarily 'a good read'. Specifically, the judges were asked to 'choose the books they would most want to press into the hands of friends and family for their quality and readability'. In other words the Nero Fiction Award is a prize for middlebrow novels. The word 'middlebrow' has been abused by highbrows but I want to reclaim it. The great central tradition of the novel in English is middlebrow. (The key novel of the 19th century is called Middlemarch.)
So, what is the condition of the middlebrow novel in the UK and Ireland, as of 2024? Usually people answer this sort of question by praising the novel's 'rude health'. But this wasn't quite what I concluded. We read some excellent books. We had no trouble finding a shortlist of four good ones. But speaking for myself, I found the middlebrow novel in an uncertain state.
Some general findings. People are writing a lot of giant, emphatic novels. The prose and the plots are uneconomical. Economy, of course, is the fruit of revision, and novelists simply aren't revising their prose enough, or well enough. They roll out their paragraphs like flannel. Hence many of the novels I read had a sort of polystyrene quality. They were large but light, made up mostly of air. As if they were in some way not fully rooted in the real, the tangible world.
What else? Tyrants recur, in our contemporary novels. Property developers, billionaires, feudal lords, secret policemen, kings, gods ... This shouldn't surprise us. We have entered a new age of tyranny. The old autocrats haunt our middlebrow fiction, as if to prepare liberal readers for the future.
Another discovery: if the contemporary novel has a characteristic tone, it is one of ingratiation. Novelists are constantly soliciting our approval. As if the proper response to a novel is to click the Like button. The context in which such novels appear to be written is not the old reality of realism but the new reality of social media.
Climate change looms over our middlebrow novels, also unsurprisingly. It tends to appear in the form of scenes in which chaotic or catastrophic weather events occur. But the way to write about climate change is not to put lots of meteorology in your book. It's to write about climate change by seeming to write about something else. This, after all, is how we actually think about climate change, most of the time: by thinking, or by seeming to be thinking, about something else.
I read the novels 'blind' (that is, I didn't Google any of them beforehand). With alarming frequency, I would toil my way through 400 pages of semi-literate garbage, only to discover, when I finally did Google the book in question, that it had sold a million copies, was everyone's Book of the Year, and was already being turned into a Netflix series. As Tony Soprano would say: whaddaya gonna do?
As if in compensation for this sort of thing, I read three or four superb novels that I would not otherwise have encountered in the course of my reading life. Among them was our winner, Adam S Leslie's unnerving, dreamlike folk horror novel Lost in the Garden: a choice of which I am proud.
But after tackling those 70-odd novels, my inescapable conclusion was that the middlebrow novel as such is in the middle of a crisis of faith. The liberal world that nourished middlebrow fiction is being rolled back across the West. The cultural contexts that shaped the middlebrow novel, and which formed its vital subject matter, are evaporating before our eyes.
Our final judge's meeting took place in London, last November. It was the day before the American presidential election. The next day, I watched Trump sweep the popular vote. I had just read 70 novels about the old world. I wondered: what kind of novel might help us start to think about the new?
Kevin Power is Associate Professor of Literary Practice in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin