My fellow authors are too busy chasing prizes to write about what matters | Amit Chaudhuri | Opinion | The Guardian

The other reason is that the Booker prize is most literary publishers' primary marketing tool. There are relatively few Diana Athills (Athill was VS Naipaul's editor) and Charles Monteiths (Monteith was William Golding's) today: publishers who identify, and are loyal to, novelists in the long term because of commitment to literary merit. Publishing houses were once homes to writers; the former gave the latter the necessary leeway to create a body of work. Today there's little intellectual or material investment in writers: literary prizes and shortlists are meant to sell books, and, although there's a plethora of them, the Man Booker is the only one that has a real commercial impact.