London’s biggest book awards “appear designed to exclude as much as to enthuse; a mirror, perhaps, of an insular society with secretive, snobbish traditions,” says Urban Fox in a Times of London article. Fox notes, “The annual Man Booker prize, open to fiction writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, was, until the creation of a parallel international prize this year, in practice the prize that rewarded all English-language fiction that was not American. And the Orange prize is for novelists — as long as they are not men. And feeling left out makes people angry, especially in a touchy community of writers whose collective appetite for vinegary white wine and tribal feuding would put many a warlord to shame.” Meanwhile, June is when some of the most lucrative prizes are awarded: the Orange and Samuel Johnson prizes are each worth £30,000 ($55,000), while the new Man Booker International prize is worth £60,000 ($110,000). Thus, says Fox, “June has traditionally been a time for invective, fallings-out, and gratuitous viciousness.” This year, however, something bizarre has happened: “none of the usual skirmishes have begun.” Seemingly stunned, Fox asks, “Has peace broken out on the London book scene?”