Don’t shoot the (good) poets
We know perfectly well, even if we don’t admit it, that awards of every stripe—especially state ones—aren’t handed down from on high. They’re simply the choices of a handful of people. Awards reflect nothing more than the views, tastes, and personal values of three, four, or five individuals—in the case of Cyprus’s State Literature Awards—who couldn’t possibly speak for society at large.
The same goes for competitions of every kind, whether for literature, film, music, or anything else. Plenty of laureates have refused awards in the past, even some considered prestigious—the Nobels, the Oscars. For an artist, being singled out and rewarded this way is obviously flattering, and it’s a chance to get their work noticed and make some sales.
Committees decide by majority vote. Still, there’s nothing wrong with a member publicly voicing their disagreement with a particular choice. But Kyriakos Ioannides, chair of the committee for Cyprus’s 2024 book awards, went further: he questioned the competence of the very committee he sat on, simply because he didn’t like what the majority decided.
What’s more, he took aim specifically at Alexandros Chronides, the young poet who won the New Writer Award, in a graceless and demeaning manner. The (surreal) result? Within days, the book flew off bookshop shelves. It seems Ioannides’s contempt for Chronides and his work backfired spectacularly, sparking public interest—and rightly so, I’d say, given that the young poet’s work is genuinely worthwhile. Apparently it matters who’s slagging you off…
This, of course, is just my personal assessment, which no one’s obliged to accept. But it carries the same weight as that of any committee member, or anyone else for that matter. Not so much because I might have specialist knowledge, reading, experience, and so on—at least as much as Ioannides and the others—but because everyone’s taste deserves respect, even when it doesn’t align with the creator’s intentions, even when it registers differently. A work of art, like a book, stops belonging to its creator the moment it’s finished and “released.” It becomes part of the community, which may embrace it or reject it, or indeed interpret it entirely differently.
Still, a question arises: are there measurable criteria for judging a work’s value—a poetry collection, in this case? Yes, there are, however much assessments may differ. A book can be objectively good or bad based on certain quality markers—linguistic, ideological, literary, originality, and so on—which needn’t be dissected here.
At the same time, there’s the element of taste, of personal preference, partly independent of literary merit. A book might be technically excellent but clash with a reader’s aesthetic or other criteria—they simply don’t like it. However, the reverse doesn’t hold: a qualitatively poor book can’t please anyone—unless they’ve got burnt-out brain cells. And yet such books have won prizes, even internationally.
Alexandros Chronides’s poetry in his collection By the Rivers of Babylon (Almyra, 2024) is genuinely fresh and engaging. “The poet transports us to a contemporary, dystopian landscape, where Babylon becomes a symbol of today’s decline, of alienation from our roots, and of human estrangement,” notes the book’s back cover. “Some ‘critics’ hand me / The rope to hang myself / They plait it into a noose with artful care / Then slip it round their own necks / ‘Watch this,’ they tell me, ‘this is how it’s worn’ / They take two steps / And drop through the trapdoor / Of their own Ego,” he writes—a poetic riposte, clearly, to the attacks he’s endured.
