Literary awards like the Booker add

Literary awards like the Booker add value to the literary commodity, thereby increasing its sale in the literary marketplace. Daniel Allington points out how the “mere shortlisting apparently raised British sales of The Inheritance of Loss to 500 per week, a very respectable rate of sale for a literary novel in hardback” (123). Allington also makes an interesting observation regarding who benefits from the circulation of the book in the market and by its legitimization in the form of the Booker Prize. Allington notes that even when the winner is not British, the publisher of the book is often British. Allington cites the case of Desai’s novel which was published internationally by subsidiaries and imprints of the Penguin Group, a conglomerate headquartered in London.