Throughout this book I have made reference to key scholars and texts that have become central to academic scholarship about prize culture, and literary award culture in particular. These are discussed in detail in the introductory chapter, where I illustrate the fields use and development of the work of Pierre Bourdieu regarding the identification, negotiation and intraconversion of cultural, social, economic and journalistic capital. While scholars may agree on the transactions and intraconversions of capital within literary prize culture, this chapter will challenge current understandings of how literary award culture functions. As this history of the Saltire Society Literary Awards reveals, literary awards do not exist within a cultural vacuum, but are in fact shaped by the external sociocultural and political events and circumstances from which they are created and exist. What this examination of the Saltire Society Literary Awards also illustrates is how constructing such cultural histories of prizes not only enables for a better understanding of the sociocultural and political environment from which prizes emerge but also reveals more insight into how literary prizes function within the literary and publishing industry. Accordingly, in this chapter I will demonstrate that, in order to progress current understandings of literary prizes (and, indeed, cultural prizes more generally), it is important to consider new methodologies and conceptualisations for critical analyses of literary awards.

Current Understandings of Literary Awards Culture

As it stands, there are certain prizes which hold, and will hold forevermore, a pinnacle status within the hierarchy of literary awards (and cultural awards more generally). James F. English argues that there is a ‘single-winner axiom’ which underlies the ‘entire prize economy’. He applies this to the Nobel Prize for Literature, suggesting that