| The 2024 Nobel Prize ceremonies took place in Scandinavia this week, honoring winners including the novelist and New Yorker contributor Han Kang. In claiming the literature award, Kang joins a pantheon populated by Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, and Toni Morrison. And yet, as Louis Menand pointed out in 2005, a Nobel isn’t a guarantee of eternal glory: past recipients have included the likes of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Rudolf Eucken, whose œuvres (which we’re sure are wonderful!) no longer shine as brightly, if they’re remembered at all. As Menand shows, the Nobel Literature Prize has sparked controversy since its very first year, when a Russian author you’ve definitely heard of was passed over in favor of a French writer you likely haven’t. In more recent decades, cultural prizes have proliferated. When Menand published his article, there were more movie awards handed out each year than new movies being made; in the book world, the number of honors was growing faster than the number of books. The contest for recognition is about money, of course, generating entire economic ecosystems to support it. But it also carries genuine cultural influence, arguably creating new categories of art. (Without it, the literary world might not have “world literature.”) As the Nobels, Oscars, and other honors rise and fall in esteem, the etiquette for accepting them changes, too. But, whatever your opinion of cultural awards, the most important thing might be that you have one. “Contempt for prizes is not harmful to the prize system,” Menand writes, paraphrasing a scholar, “On the contrary, contempt for prizes is what the system is all about.” | 
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