Give us back our shortlists

The judges should have given a handful of writers the chance to put 'shortlisted for a Frank O'Connor award' on their next book

Hitherto, I am afraid I have not been on very familiar terms with the Frank O'Connor award, which is given to the best writer of a short story collection anywhere in the world. But now it will stick in my mind until the end of my days because this year the judges dispensed with a shortlist. They agreed straight away that they weren't going to find anything better than Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, so they gave her the prize without going through the rigmarole of announcing a shortlist. As they put it: "We decided it would be a sham to compose a shortlist and put five other writers through unnecessary stress and suspense."

Now, let me get one thing straight: I like the idea of the Frank O'Connor award. Short stories don't get noticed enough these days, and this is a valuable corrective. It's a generous prize, too - €35,000 - and, a nice touch, if the stories were originally written in another language, the translator into English gets half the dosh.

But this business of dispensing with the shortlist - I don't like that at all. There are two main reasons, and only one is literary.

The first is that prizes like this exist not simply to reward individual writers but to raise consciousness, and therefore sales. As the Booker has shown, you can't really do this with more than six. And sometimes even that's too many: in 1975 the judges decided that the year's output had been so piss-poor that they could only come up with a list of two. But even if the judges know who's going to win, what the hell is the harm in giving a few writers a little hope by putting them on a shortlist, however much of a "sham" that might be? And why deny these other unfortunate, not-as-good-as-Jhumpa-Lahiri writers the chance to put "shortlisted for the 2008 Frank O'Connor award" on the back of their next book? It doesn't look too bad, and writers, particularly writers of short stories, need all the help they can get. (Incidentally, Lahiri already sells by the skipload, which might make other putative shortlistees ponder on natural justice for a while.)

The second reason is that the judges have committed the unpardonable sin of failing to cater for that section of the literary public - and indeed the non-literary public - that likes a flutter. These prizes are only half about literature. They're half about gambling. I'm not sure that the Frank O'Connor award attracts as much Action as the Booker, but it has to attract some. And not only that, we would have had all the glamour of a truly fixed race - why deny the judges the chance to murmur in a friend's ear that a pony or two on Lahiri wouldn't be an unwise investment? The whole business is sickening. It spits in the face of tradition and sets a dangerous precedent. Give us our shortlists back.

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