I was one of the jurors in 2015 charged with reading 168 books. One of the frustrations was feeling that some publishers were submitting books that clearly had no shot at the longlist, let alone the prize, but that we were obliged to read anyway. By that, I mean titles that were very genre-based, rather than what might be called literary fiction. I certainly felt that if publishers were a little more judicious in their choices, then we could have had a more manageable number to read. Everyone – publishers, readers, novelists and above all the Giller organisers themselves – want the very best books to make the list but writers whose first question of their publisher is whether or not they’ll be submitted for awards consideration are perhaps missing the point of what writing is all about.