On Wednesday night, the young American writer Madeline Miller won the 17th Orange prize for fiction with her novel The Song of Achilles. It is her first book, and to win the Orange will put rocket boosters under her career. Shame then, that only a few days earlier, Orange announced it had taken the strategic decision to pull out of sponsoring the prize. Good news for film (it sponsors the Baftas). Bad news for books, authors and publishers.
For the chosen few, literary prizes make a career. It is not only the money, it's the profile. No two people ever agree about a novel, and tales of fisticuffs on the judging panel are the stuff of successful sponsorship. Confining an award to women writers in English is more contentious still. But critics like AS Byatt who famously called the Orange award "sexist" might consider the impact on sales of the Bessie. Four of the top five bestsellers of recent serious fiction won the Orange. Only Booker winner Yann Martel's Life of Pi has done better. Ever since 1996 when Orange teamed up with agents and publishers to provide an alternative to the male-dominated Man Booker prize, a stream of gifted winners have had the chance to devote themselves full-time to their work. Many, like Helen Dunmore, Ann Patchett, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Andrea Levy, have gone on to film contracts, other book prizes and the kind of mass readership that gets them into the Waterstone's window. "Prizes give one novelist a chance," Linda Grant (winner in 2000) wrote recently. "A chance to go on writing, to produce a body of work, to do so without financial anxiety."
Kate Mosse, who founded the prize, insists talks with possible successor sponsors are already under way. But the PR and marketing departments who choose where to get the best value for their sponsorship buck tell a different story. The Bafta awards, with their famous-from-TV stars and edge-of-the-seat presentation, guarantee their sponsor hours of primetime TV. The Man Booker prize might get a section on Newsnight Review. Sponsoring women writers just about makes it onto the news channels.
If literature is beginning to struggle to find commercial sponsorship, the Arts Council might dig deeper. But although its support for literature has increased recently, it is still running at just 2% of its total budget, while its principal focus is on poetry, translation, and black and minority ethnic writing and publishing. Of course, they need the support too. The uncomfortable truth is that all literature, especially new literature, is becoming an unsponsorable commodity – unlike mass-audience, multi-platform film, it is a luxury enjoyed in solitude.
• This article was amended on 1 June 2012, to remove an incorrect suggestion that Martha Lane Fox had "dismissed Orange as turnips" at this week's Orange prize awards ceremony.
