Hiding for off-topic talk about the Akutagawa award
Ah cool, so I guess two circles would be their first choice for the award, one circle their second, and the triangle the runner-up?
So we’ve been having this chat about pure literature across threads, and now with the Akutagawa award I decided to read up on it a little more. Happily I ran across a thesis in English on this very subject: 純文学 and the Akutagawa prize, or more precisely “How Junbungaku affects the Akutagawa prize and Japan’s commercial literary world”. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but it explains the difference between 純文学 and 大衆文学, or rather the difference in criteria between the two awards, and examines the relation of magazines/publishing houses and these awards.
According to this thesis, the Akutagawa prize is awarded to new authors, on the basis of a singe work (I didn’t know that), while the Naoki prize takes into account the writer’s entire career including future prospects.
These new literary works by new authors are usually initially published in a literary magazine, I’m guessing a little like how manga first appear in magazines along with other works, and then are published on their own?
For example, this is the magazine the second Akutagawa winner was holding. It features three stories/novellas/novels(?) by different authors, one of which is the winning one. This would also answer my question about a video on Akutagawa nominees further up in this thread. The booktuber presenting them was reading from the magazine where each work first appeared, and not the book published independently.