Annual literary prizes began life in 1903 in France with the founding of the Prix Goncourt, and they have proliferated there more than in other nations. Yet prizes are not always greeted by their recipient with unalloyed joy: an “antiprize rhetoric” is part of the standard response for to win the Goncourt, for example, “tient a la fois du banc d’infamie et de la legion d’Honneur,” as Sylvie Ducas puts it. Though of immense advantage to an author’s career and financial fortune, prizes are tainted not only by the cynical assumption of a corrupt relationship between publishing houses and juries, but also by the incompatibility between the image of the writer as solitary, authentic, and aesthetically ahead of his or her time, and the fact that prizes mean a large mainstream readership. Prizes, in other words, are demeaningly middlebrow. Women, unsurprisingly, have formed a small minority of prizewinners, and when they do win their response tends to be more positive than that of their male counterparts. The hi...