My absolute favorite task, when I was the Vice President of Awards for the National Book Critics Circle, was when we had narrowed down all of the titles we’d considered to five finalists for our six NBCC awards prize categories and it was time to let people know. I was the one who got to send 30 separate emails to the publicists or editors who worked on the books to tell them the good news. There’s nothing like going right to the overworked and often underpaid source and letting them know that their hard work had, to some extent, paid off. It’s some real “this is why we do this” kind of joy.

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As we come into another awards season, especially the 2025 season as our country descends further and further into fascism, it’s understandable to feel a bit agnostic or maybe even cynical about book awards. To think they don’t matter, or that there are too many, or that who cares because few Americans read for pleasure anymore. Sometimes it feels so lonely to care deeply about art (in this case, books, but really art all around) that has been devalued over and over again.

So I want to do a little cheerleading for book awards (except maybe the ones sponsored by warmongering banks, of course). As Amber Sparks pointed out in 2023, prizes are a way for authors, the majority of whom don’t earn a living from writing books, to make a little money. We love when authors get a few extra bucks! It’s also worth noting that since then, a variety of small publishers and other literary organizations have lost their NEA funding, and getting a win in a big prize category can turn a small press’s year around (see how Transit Books was taken to a whole new level when Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2023).

I will take any opportunity available to celebrate the authors and workers who care about putting books into the world.

Another thing that’s changed even in the past few years is that there are fewer and fewer spaces for cultural criticism of all kinds, but book criticism in particular, as Kristen Martin in a recent Substack post. When there are fewer places for experts to weigh in on the books currently being published, at least judges for book prizes have the chance to show the world the ones they particularly loved. I always valued the National Book Critics Circle Awards because it allowed me and a bunch of other critics I admire to do just that.

I especially love a year in which there’s a lack of consensus about the best books, like in 2023 when a bunch of different books won all of the major awards. That’s more exciting to me than last year, when James swept the fiction categories, with even the Pulitzer board overriding their fiction judges to award the big prize to Percival Everett’s novel. Winning just one major award may not propel a title to megabestsellerdom (even winning a National Book Award isn’t as straight a path to bestseller lists as it used to) but it does get more eyes on and more recognition for a variety of different books.

Not that literary awards don’t have their share of problems. According to a 2023 study the National Book Awards still has a lot of work to do when it comes to highlighting diverse authors and judges. As the study showed, over the past few years they really have been doing the work and improving, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

More worrisome to me is how Penguin Random House continues to dominate the awards. Last year, eleven out of twenty finalists in Fiction and Nonfiction were published by PRH. No matter how deserving each of these individual books were (And to be clear, they were! As I said last year, I absolutely know that the awards judges chose to elevate the voices they found most deserving without bias regarding publisher) monopolies aren’t great for the industry overall. It’s lovely that the prizes have become more diverse with respect to authors’ backgrounds, but I still feel squeamish to see one corporation dominate.

Literary awards aren’t the be-all-end-all when it comes to the success of a particular book or the industry in general. Still, I can’t help but feel hopeful when nominations announcements start rolling out (I always love how the Kirkus Prize gets the season going immediately after Labor Day). I will take any opportunity available to celebrate the authors and workers who care about putting books into the world. And in fact, I’m looking forward to attending a few awards ceremonies, to putting on some nice clothes and a little makeup and meeting up with old friends and remembering, despite the day to day drudgery of trying to make it in the publishing world, that books matter.