October 5, 2022

“i simply will never be over this,” tweeted Sarah Thankam Mathews this week, following the announcement that her debut novel All This Could Be Different was selected as one of the five finalists for the United States National Book Awards for fiction. Mathews, 31-years-old, has about 4,300 followers on Twitter while she follows about 2,500.

The narrator of the story is Sneha, a daughter of Indian immigrants in the U.S. She graduates from college during an economic recession and is fortunate to find an entry-level corporate job in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Though she finds the work grueling, it is financially rewarding: she can pay for dinners with her new friend Tig and send money to her parents back in India.

Sneha, who dates women, develops a burning crush on Marina, “a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach.”

Soon, the characters face a loss of jobs; fear of being evicted from rented apartments; and surfacing of painful, hidden secrets. Sneha “throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina.” Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems.

“I was twenty-two. A teak-switch of a girl. I had finished college…The economy had punctured like a tire,” Mathews writes on the opening page of her novel. Her fiction writing style is similar to that of many young authors, which is apparently popular with young readers: a confident, breezy tone mixed with ironic, even snide, comments aimed at evoking a funny response. The list of “related products” on the book’s Amazon page, at least as selected by the online retailer’s algorithms, include fiction titles: Lessons in Chemistry: a Novel; Malibu Rising: a Novel; and Daisy Jones & The Six: a Novel. “Mathews has a big heart and a sharp tongue, both put to great use to answer the question we all have when we’re 22: ‘Who am I?’” noted a reviewer in The New York Times.

Rubberdust, a short story by Mathews, was included in the Best American Short Stories, 2020. Her non-fiction writing includes Bed-Stuy Strong, about a mutual aid network she founded in March 2020 in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York. It raised $1.2 million in grassroots donations, using it to distribute a week or more of groceries to more than 28,000 Brooklynites during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mathews, who lives in Brooklyn, was born in India to parents who are from the state of Kerala. From the age of two, she spent 14 years with her parents in Oman, Middle East. Mathews told Aliya Bhatt of ATM Magazine, “In my life, there is a connection between reading Arundhati Roy and Toni Morrison as a teenager in Oman and what I ended up working on, living, believing.”

Her family emigrated to the U.S. when Mathews was sixteen. In the U.S., in the mid-2000’s, she observed brown men like her father being interrogated for two hours when they attempted to travel by air; and women, who look like her mother, being ignored by the sales assistants at J.C. Penney, the department store. Catholics from Kerala, she and her family attended a mega-church, apparently run by an evangelical pastor, where they were treated with respect.

Mathews attended the high school in Palatine, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. In her first year there, she got “a C- on my test in English, which was always my best subject before.” She earned a degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and then worked in Washington DC as a junior policy and advocacy analyst.

When she was 24, Mathews, her sister, and parents got their Green-cards, which allows the holder to stay and work in the U.S., eight years after they applied for it.  

Shifting from policy work to writing, Mathews earned a fellowship in fiction at the Iowa Writers Workshop as well as a fellowship at the New York based Asian American Writer’s Workshop. The workshop at Iowa University, Des Moines, is a two-year residency program which culminates in the submission of a thesis – a novel, a collection of stories or a book of poetry – and a Master of Fine Arts degree.  

Do the National Book Awards Favor Books from Big Publishers?

The National Book Awards (NBA) were established in 1950 “to celebrate the best writing in America.” Since 1989 they have been overseen by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization. The awards are selected by a team of five judges, “writers, translators, critics, librarians, and booksellers.” And, “Only publishers may nominate books” for the award.

Currently, each year the awards cover Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry and Young People’s Literature, written by U.S. citizens and published in the U.S. In addition, a Translated Literature award was established in 2018. It is given jointly to authors and translators of fiction and nonfiction works by living authors, including non-U.S. citizens, that are published in the United States. Foreign writers who write in English are not eligible for the translation award.

The awards have been criticized on several grounds: that only 19 women have won the fiction prize in its 72 year history; and that the winning books are predominantly from the major publishers.

For instance, Tom LeClair wrote a piece in The Daily Beast titled: “The National Book Award Has Gone to Hell.” He writes that in 2005, when he was a judge of the fiction award, “one colleague tried to give the award to a family friend. Another judge supported the writer with whom she shared an agent.” Another year, when two of his friends were among the judges, LeClair notes that “discord was so intense that each judge picked one finalist, the kind of situation that can produce unpredictable horsetrading and compromise winners.”

Writing in LiteraryHub, Brandon Taylor states that LeClair is wrong to be “worried that in trying to appeal to popular interests, the NBA is sacrificing its integrity and diminishing its status as the highest award in American letters.” Taylor, an author who was a fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, added that he applauds the National Book Foundation since it “has made it part of their mission to reach out to new communities and to really broaden the conversation around which books deserve to be honored.”

However, Taylor says there is one of LeClair’s ideas “worth considering: should publishers be limited in the number of books they submit to make room for smaller presses?...After all, some of the most brilliant and ambitious work in American fiction is being done at small presses.” 

Publishers pay a fee for each book they nominate and cover expenses for travel and promotion if one of their authors is chosen as a finalist. LeClair states that “To please their writers, deep-pocket publishers nominate many books…In this pay to play system, small presses with a distinctly literary mission are priced out and judges are overwhelmed with 300 books.”

In fact, for the 2022 fiction award, there were 467 books submitted by the publlishers. The submission deadline was May 15 - June 30 for copies to be mailed to the judges - and the long list was announced on September 16. So, assuming the judges read all the books, they had to read an average of four to six books a day.

There is little or no criticism in the media about such issues, presumably because journalists and editors hope to get their books published by tha big publishers and win the award. The announcement on the National Book Foundation’s website, of the ten books which were selected for the longlist for the 2022 fiction awards, has this prominently displayed: Find The New Yorker’s announcement here. This implied that The New Yorker, many of whose writers have won the NBA, ia a booster of the award and approves of the selection process.

Sarah Thankam Mathews is Grateful to Her Parents

Mathews’s novel was published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House (PRH), one of the big five publishers; the others being Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. Two of the other NBA finalists for fiction this year were also published by imprints of PRH; a fourth is from Astra Publishing House, whose sales and distribution ars handled by PRH; and the fifth is from Beacon Press, founded and run by the Unitarian Universalist Church since 1854, which has published books by James Baldwin, as well as previous NBA winners.

In All This Could Be Different , Mathews “tells the story of a young queer immigrant who creates a community for herself while grappling with the oppressive demands of capitalism,” the National Book Foundation, which organizes the award, said in a statement. The novel has gotten favorable reviews from Vogue, Elle, Buzzfeed and several other publications. Mathews was also featured by the Observer as part of its celebration of “a variety of queer creatives.”

There are three women and two men on the panel of judges for the 2022 NBA fiction award. The panel is chaired by Ben Fountain, an author and an NBA finalist in 2012. Mathews will find out on November 16, at an award gala organized in New York, if her novel has won the award.

The monetary prize for the NBA winners is relatively small: each finalist receives $1,000 while the winner receives $10,000 – the United Kingdom’s Booker Prize, in contrast, awards 50,000 British Pounds to the winner. But, perhaps more so than the Booker Prize, the NBA offers other major benefits to winners and finalists including: a boost in sales of the book, especially with libraries in the U.S. buying copies – there are more than 9,000 public libraries in the U.S.; more lucrative book deals; teaching assignments; and higher fees for speaking at events.  

Mathews’s parents emigrated to the U.S. to provide a good education for their daughters, she wrote in a 2015 article in Buzzfeed News, titled How To Get Your Greencard In America. “My father dreams outsize dreams for me; he tells me that he hopes I’ll publish a great novel or start my own company,” Mathews wrote,or “become the U.S. Secretary of Education or win a Pulitzer Prize.

With her novel being selected as a finalist for the National Book Awards, Mathews has made good progress towards fulfilling her father’s dreams. “My parents' sacrifice and courage,” she wrote in Buzzfeed, “paved the way for me to live in America. I am grateful to them every day.”

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