In June, a late afternoon on London’s Greenwich Peninsula. Image – Getty: IR Stone
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘Incompatible’
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London’s Polari Prizes Release Their 2025 Longlists
You may remember that Publishing Perspectives published the 15th-anniversary 12-title longlists from the Polari on August 6. The Polari offers two prizes: a Polari Prize and a Polari First Book Prize. Shortlists were expected in late September, with winners to be named on November 27.
This is far from one of the richest programs of awards in the prize-saturated UK market. This honor pays £2,000 (US$2,704) to its main winner and £1,000 (US$1,352) to its debut publication winner. But the Polari’s distinction is its focus on work from Ireland and the UK which is written by or about the LGBTQ+ community.
By August 11, Ella Creamer at The Guardian was writing that 800 people in the writing and publishing corps had signed a statement objecting to the longlisting of Irish author John Boyne’s Earth (Penguin Random House / Doubleday). Creamer reported that as many as 10 of Boyne’s fellow longlistees had withdrawn from the awards, as had some jurors, including 2023’s First Book Prize winner, Nicola Dinan, who had been on this year’s jury panel.
The statement being signed by hundreds of people asserted, in part, that John Boyne’s “public statements on trans rights and identity are incompatible with the LGBTQ+ community’s most basic standards of inclusion. In any year, the decision to include Mr Boyne on the longlist would be, in our view, inappropriate and hurtful to the wider community of LGBTQ+ readers and writers. That the decision has been made this year—in the context of rising anti-trans hatred and systematic exclusion of trans people from public life in the UK and across the world—is inexcusable.”
Questions in the Wake of the Controversy
Setting aside the specifics of this incident, one of the effects of this event with the Polari Prize for award programmers may be a question of whether it’s necessary to vet their longlists and/or shortlists for political and/or social activity; if so, how extensively would this be done, on what grounds, and with what procedural criteria in place to ensure as open and earnest a stance as possible?
The Polari Prize operates in a particularly sensitive sphere, of course, one defined by politics for many, by the profound dynamics of self-identity for many, and by sheer affection and commitment for many. Our purpose here is in no way to minimize the importance that many have found in the Boyne-Polaris incident.
It does, however, offer an opportunity for many organizers of book and publishing awards programs in the international book business to consider whether there are wider implications for their own work, especially in an era of newly accessible and potentially very fast public response.
Does the governing board of a given competition need to survey all the submissions being presented to it by publishers for potentially controversial social and/or political issues prior to handing the first round of readings to a jury?—When does one criterion or another become weigh on the process? Does this happen in some cases already?
Is the work of all the authors whose books are handed to jurors usually known to competition managers? Should that even be a consideration at the initial phase of submissions’ receipt?
Are there points in a jury’s process that discussions of these issues should be held? Or is that a heavy-handed contradiction of the basic tenet of the jurors’ sole concern being freely discerning the best literature?
In fact, do these considerations raise a concern of too much attention to “acceptable” and “appropriate” for the purest efforts of a literary jury to function without impediment?
The Polari Program’s Responses
The initial response of the Polari Prize program, communicated to The Guardian, was to apologize to anyone who had experienced “hurt and anger” as a result of the Boyne selection, and to “accept and respect” the decisions of nominees and jurors who had withdrawn. At that point, however, the prize organizers said they were going forward with the program, while reviewing procedures.
By August 18, however, the Polari Prize managers had reversed course and stated on X that they had “decided to pause the prize this year while we increase representation of trans and gender non-conforming jurors on the panels for all the awards and undertake a governance and management review to include our aims and values and work to better support everyone in our LGBTQ+ Polari community.” In short, this was a cancellation of the awards program for 2025.
For Boyne’s part, what was mainly at issue was an article he had published on July 27 in the Irish Independent in which, as Steven McIntosh wrote for BBC News, “offered his support to the “Harry Potter” author JK Rowling, who has in recent years been outspoken with her views about the tension between trans rights and the protection of women’s spaces.”
Boyne uses the acronym TERF for himself (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). While maintaining his stance on transgender issues, Boyne communicated that if the withdrawing writers would return to the Polari longlist, he would request that his own book not be considered for the shortlist.
And finally, the wider question is if and how awards program organizers might assess this situation.
More from Publishing Perspectives on publishing and book awards is here, more on the United Kingdom’s market is here, more on the Polari Prizes is here, and more on LGBTQ issues and publishing is here.
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