Trouble Brewing in the UK
Monday, February 18, 2008 
(This story has been making its way across the Web faster than Steve Austin in pursuit of bad guys.)
The 850 writers who submitted short stories to the Willesden Herald International's fiction contest this year are up in arms after guest judge Zadie Smith refused to award the annual prize to any of them. None of the submitters, including those who were notified they'd been shortlisted, will take home the £5,000 prize this year (that's like a million US with the recent devaluation of the dollar).
Whether you come down on the side of Ed Champion, who excoriates Smith for unbridled snobbery, or you gives props to Willesden for trying to raise the bar for contemporary short fiction, it's an interesting question: is a literary competition obligated to name a winner regardless of the quality of the submissions?
In Smith's words:
Hmmm....Our sole criterion is quality. We simply wanted to see some really great stories. And we received a whole bunch of stories. We dutifully read through hundreds of them. But in the end – we have to be honest – we could not find the greatness we’d hoped for.
Reader Comments (3)
I think I just threw up in my mouth.
And the sad part, is that Smith will take most of the blame for what was pretty much a group-grope when it came down to the judging. If she was only presented with a handful of stories and no judging criteria, I can hardly blame her.
That's all the literary world needs. More pretension or the appearance thereof.
Yeah, this was a serious debacle. And Smith is only partly to blame. It's clear from the series of apology letters that the staff mismanaged the entire process. A damn shame and likely to turn off both readers and aspiring writers.
See, I love me some Zadie Smith even knowing she would not "find greatness" in my writing.