Commentary

The prize

Soundings by Michele Field

by Michele Field •

October 1980, no. 25

Commentary

The prize

Soundings by Michele Field

by Michele Field •

October 1980, no. 25

American authors and publishers like to choose sides. The adversaries are seldom strictly Authors v Publishers – some best-selling novelists often join the publishers’ team, and publishers of new fiction like Farrar, Straus & Giroux line up on the authors’ side. Last May the battleground was drawn again in the national Book Awards (that’s not the old capital-N National Book Awards, or the NEA, but the new capital-T The American Book Awards, or TABA).

In the New York Times, novelist John Irving (The World According to Garp) wondered whether the advantages of book prizes ever compensate for the ill will they generate. I imagine that the ill will exists anyway, but it is made more obvious by the ostentation of the awards.

Michele Field

Michele Field (1942–2020) was an American-born writer, editor, and scholar who lived and worked in Australia in the seventies and early eighties. Having completed her doctorate on Jorge Luis Borges, Field moved to London where she was a regular correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and wrote columns for the Times Literary Supplement and Weekend Australian. She acted as a cultural ambassador of sorts in London, both as a representative for the Australia Council and as a local informant for Leo Schofield when the latter began his directorship of the Sydney Festival in 1998. With Timothy Willett, she co-edited Convict love tokens : the leaden hearts the convicts left behind (1998).