Jane Sullivan from The Age has waded in to the literary prize debate.

She flagged that in a survey of winners of the Miles Franklin over the last 64 years, they were predominantly won by white men from NSW in their 40s and 50s.

Sullivan is right. Back in the 60s and 70s, men ruled the roost. Although fans of Charmaine Clift, Thea Astley (three Miles Franklins), Elizabeth Jolley, Helen Garner, Janet Turner Hospital, Olga Masters, Shirley Hazzard and Barbara Hanrahan, might disagree.

Recently we’ve seen more female winners who are young and a few first-time novelists. Four Indigenous authors have also won in the past two decades.

Some Australian writers argue against prizes and I’m with them. They include publisher Ivor Indyk, Maxine Beneba Clarke and critic Emmett Stinson. They state that prizes are crap at the business of literary taste-making and are more like cultural Bingo.

“We want awards to be clear markers of excellence,” writes author Daniel Mendelsohn, “but if anything they repeatedly demonstrate that there are no absolute standards for judging aesthetic matters.”

Well, how about the shock of the new, the clever use or irony, satire, humour or paradox?

“Make it more Chinese,” one agent told Paige Clark, an Australian-Chinese writer who was trying to get her book published.

In fact, the pendulum has swung so far back, it’s meaningless to talk of literary prizes as reflecting anything other than the predominantly middle brow political predilections of the judges.

It’s hard to say who is more blinkered: the big swinging dicks of the literary patriarchy or the exclusive and suffocating world of the PC elite.