What eleven readers owe a book
On the discipline of judging, and why every entered book deserves the same quality of attention.
A literary prize is only as serious as its reading. Everything else about an awards program — the medal, the ceremony, the announcement — is downstream of a quieter thing: whether the books were actually read, closely, by people equipped to read them well. This is why the Florida Book Awards is judged by a standing jury of eleven working authors, and why the structure of that jury is worth explaining in public.
Each entered book is read in full by at least two jurors. Where those two readers disagree, a third is assigned. Shortlists are drawn up in writing — every juror must argue for a book in prose, not merely score it — and medals are decided by the panel in deliberation, together, in a single long session that has been known to run past midnight. The jury may confer fewer medals than the categories allow.
Why writers, and not a mixed panel
Why authors, rather than a mixed panel of critics, librarians, and civic figures? Not because those readers matter less — they are often a book's best advocates — but because the questions a working writer asks of a manuscript are the questions this prize exists to ask. Is the sentence doing what it claims? Is the structure load-bearing or decorative? Did the author take the difficult path when the material demanded it?
Writers also read against their own habits. A poet reading a novel notices what the novelist has stopped noticing; a historian reading fiction spots the seam where research became imagination. Every book is read by at least one juror who does not work in its form.
Reading without regard for imprint
What does the jury owe a book? Attention without prejudice as to its press. A university monograph, a trade hardcover, and an author-published paperback arrive at the jury table stripped of their imprints' reputations and read on the same terms. This is not a courtesy; it is the entire premise. The medal must mean the same thing on every cover it appears on, or it means nothing on any of them.
Recusal is strict. Any juror who has taught the author, edited the book, shared an agent with the writer, or read the manuscript in draft removes themselves from that book's consideration.
What we ask in return
And what does a book owe the jury? Only itself, finished. Send us your best work. It will be read as though it matters, because it does.