As the systematic biases are stripped away from prize-giving and the reviewing of Australian authors, I do expect we will see more authors from wider and richer backgrounds represented on shortlists for these prizes. And it makes my heart swell, even though it means such a strong competition. These literary awards are the one place in the literary world where year after year, success is a zero-sum game. It strengthens the entire community when the voices of the disenfranchised and the overlooked are represented alongside those who have enjoyed the lion’s share of awards and accolades for so long.

The narrator of Bob Dylan’s ‘Highlands’, the rambling, meandering conclusion to his Time Out of Mind, 1996), faces this question during a strangely distracted encounter he’s having with a waitress. For all that her line of enquiry is unexpected – they’ve been discussing his order and sketches until then – the narrator’s response fits a standard, familiar pattern: How would you know, he asks, and what would it matter anyway?