crackercrews

> Every couple of years, someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about complains publicly that judging panels are picking books based on wokeness or diversity quotas or some other nonsense.

OK, so the judging panels are not picking books based on diversity quotas, cool. But then she admits that the longlists are subject to diversity quotas:

> It’s true that longlists don’t look like they used to. This might have to do with prize committees themselves finally diversifying, which means a broader variety of opinions and tastes. And it might have to do with all of us preferring books that, you know, do not sound like every other book we’ve read.

> It turns out that when we read broadly and fairly, it’s no longer true that 95% of prizes go to straight white men, go figure.

To be honest, I don't pay much attention to book prizes, but I'm well aware of claims that it's not just that "white men don't get 95% of prizes anymore" but rather that in some cases, white men are not included at all, despite making up a fairly large chunk of the population. For example, apparently no white men born in the last 40 years have published literary fiction in the New Yorker. [1]

Are there book prizes with similar track records? I don't know for sure, but I'd imagine that whoever is deciding on publishing at the New Yorker is probably pretty similar to the people handing out book awards.