Pulitzer Panel Declines Giving Out This Year's Fiction Award

If you are not an avid reader or you are guilty of sticking to genre fiction, as is my case, a great way to keep up with the wider world of reading is the yearly Pulitzer Prize awards list, created for everything from fiction to journalism. Well, until this year, when Pulitzer Prize officials decided no winner would take home the prestigious prize in the fiction category.

Three finalists made it to this year's final stages of determining the prestigious prize, including David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, Karen Russell’s alligator book, Swamplandia!, and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. Even though all three books did fairly well by various selling lists, had one of them been giving the award, the selling possibilities for each of the titles could have grown and grown. According to The Washington Post, this year is not the first year Pulitzer panel judges have withheld the fiction award. Ten times prior to this, they have bailed on handing out the recognition – the last time this happened, though, was 35 years ago.

Panelists said they spent a lot of time discussing each nominated title and could not come to a majority ruling on which author deserved the win. Honestly, what the fuck was the Pulitzer Committee thinking? Clearly, this speaks to the lack of concreteness in the panel’s rules and policies if there is disagreement. Or it speaks to some underlying committee trouble. It's not like there were no good books written in 2012, and even if this year's books were not 100% up to the par of other years, it happens occasionally. Some years the quality of the flicks nominated for Oscar Best Picture are much better or worse than other years and it is difficult to choose a winner, but can you imagine the Oscar committee just saying “nope, not this year”?

Maybe the Pulitzer panel feels it is too good for reasonable standards, but seriously, it just makes the award look incompetent when a majority can’t be reached.