This is last week’s news, but it’s still circulating around the tubes, and since it’s a fairly obscure British lit prize, I’m going to repeat it here:

Zadie Smith refused to award a literary prize because she felt that none of the books were worth celebrating. Here’s the money quote from her statement:

The little Willesden Herald Prize is only about good writing, and it turns out that a prize faithfully recognizing this imperative must also face the fact that good writing is actually very rare. For let us be honest again: it is sometimes too easy, and too tempting, to blame everything that we hate in contemporary writing on the bookstores, on the corporate publishers, on incompetent editors and corrupt PR departments – and God knows, they all have their part to play. But we also have our part to play. We also have to work out how to write better and read better. We have to really scour this internet to find the writing we love, and then we have to be able to recognize its quality. We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.

Another bit, where she refers to the fact that most literary prizes “are are really about brand consolidation for beer companies, phone companies, coffee companies and even frozen food companies,” is pretty genius, too. I’ve always loved her books, but I will love Zadie Smith forever for this.