I don’t think winning a prize is all that meaningful, but I look at nominations as a guide to current fiction, and would pick up a book that was nominated for something.

I don’t buy books specifically because they have won awards but the publicity and media attention that goes with the major awards, means that the nominated books will naturally be higher on my radar. When I walk into a bookshop for a browse or looking to buy, these books will tend to register with me as I’ve already heard about them. However, I don’t make a deliberate effort to go for the latest award winner – personal recommendations and reviews by critics I like are more important.

A prize is like a good review. But I’ve bought books that have neither prizes nor reviews and wasn’t sorry I’d read them. It would likely not be a deciding factor for me. 15 seconds riffling the first quarter of pages and reading what falls under me eye is.

Prizes and nominations don’t make you rush out and buy a book, but they are good indicators for books to be taken into consideration. It is also a good way of keeping track because you can go through long phases of reading older/classic books.

I agree with Fiona and Emmet. I wouldn’t specifically buy or read a book because it won an award, but awards do draw attention to books and I generally like to have heard something about a book before I read it. Sometimes it’s a personal recommendation or a newspaper review, but award winners and short lists are often good places to start.

The last award winning book I remember buying was Atomisé by Michel Houllebecq. I enjoyed in the way you enjoy a Milan Kundera or Sartre.

Brings you to a time when men were men and the pantry was a place one did venture in a smoking jacket so to speak. Then you wake and realise how strange chauvinism is.

But then Plato and Aristotle had a row on that two thousand years ago…

While they’re not quite as meaningless as say wine awards, literary gongs are surely primarily tools of the commercial side of the ‘writing business’. They’ve maybe got more in common with beauty contests, for those of you old enough to remember what they were, as nobody really thought Miss World or Miss Enniscorthy was anything other than a fairly attractive girl who was daft enough to actually enter a beauty contest. Even that was, like literary prize winners, highly debatable.

I personally take more interest in the Booker longlist, for instance, than I do in the eventual winner as it provides an opportunity to look back over the year in British and Irish publishing. The content of the list is always debatable – but then that’s what we like doing do we not?

Awards and competitions simply earn a book a better place on the display tables in our big bookshops. That does influence many people as bells start ringing and whether you are a Houllebecq or a Harris fan, a Keneally or a Kundera devotee, you are still susceptible to subtle marketing. Even if you don’t buy it you will be unwittingly promoting the product sooner or later, and promoting the competition and its sponsors. Libraries play their part in this as well.

There was something inevitable about Brooklyn making it onto at least the Booker and Costa shortlists. It’s becoming a bit like the English (football) Premiership. There’s the Big Four and then all the rest who inevitably struggle for a look in. Right, that’s quite enough metaphors for one day…;)

Prize winning in itself is not what would draw me to buy a particular book, but as some other comments made the point the perusal of the longlist makes for fantastic choices! I wouldn’t consider reading the prize winner above reading someone else on the list. The Richard and Judy Bookclub gave me many more hours of reading pleasure than Booker / Impac prize winners