Literary prizes, if they're to mean more to readers than a trashy one-night stand, should be given to writers for one reason only: because the writer writes well. That is the only thing that matters to serious readers, and it should be the only thing that matters to judges. Serious readers read for all sorts of reasons: to be delighted, to find consolation, for experience. They read to find the thrill of well-wrought words. More than anything though, they read for the same reason that makes the best writers write: because they have to.

That's what sets literature at odds with the prize-giving committees. It's why prizes rarely go to the best writers. There is nothing necessary about a literary prize, for a reader or a writer. Prizes are certainly important to writers, because they're about money and ego, which are as important to a writer as they are to the rest of us. But the prize isn't essential. It's part of the chatter of literary consensus: with its trends, fashions and fancy theories; its blazing talents, bestsellers, bovine opinions, and, of course, its search for "other voices". These are the things that usually decide literary prizes; not the necessity, the urgency, or the quality of the words. It is also the realm of the little literary controversy, where little talents like Carmen Callil make a big fuss off the names of big talents like Philip Roth.

The big controversy of the 2011 Man Booker International Prize for Fiction is that a major literary prize — in a marvellous coup Callil tried to stop — went to the right writer for once. The rare book dealer and writer Rick Gekoski, and the novelist Justin Cartwright, gave the prize to a writer who doesn't just write well, but who writes his guts out. In Philip Roth, they found a prizewinner whose literature readers can fall in love with for life.