Most people want to be recognised. Artists, scientists, writers — the drive to create is inseparable, for most, from the desire to be seen.
A prize won’t always be the point, but when one arrives, it tends to be welcomed: an external confirmation that what you made was worth making.
There are exceptions, of course. A rare few turn the prize down — because they distrust the institution handing it out, because they don’t believe in prizes at all, or because they want to make a point.
The latest case is Thodoris Tsomidis, born in Thessaloniki in 1994, who was awarded Greece’s State Literary Prize for Debut Author last week for his book “I Genna” (Patakis Publications, 2024).
In a public statement, Tsomidis thanked the jury — then explained why he couldn’t accept. His understanding of writing, he said, is simply incompatible with “awards, praise, and honours.” Prizes, in his view, impose a logic of ranking and competition that belongs in sport, not literature. And prizes for debut authors, specifically, he considers “premature”.
Literature, he argues, “is an affair with no winners.” A work’s value has nothing to do with whether it gets publicly recognised. History, he points out, is littered with writers who were ignored or dismissed in their own time — and who turned out to matter most of all.
Writing, he insists, must be driven by the need for honest expression and the joy of making something. Not by the hunger for approval.
“I believe writers gain nothing from prizes. Their work will be neither better nor worse because of one. And nothing undermines a creative endeavour more than the quiet, interior need to be liked — by a jury, by some vague general public, by anyone at all.
Whatever feeds that inner need — and this is an unavoidable function of every prize — creates the conditions for capitulation: to prevailing norms, to power, to the crowd.
For someone just starting out on the long road of writing, an award — with its fleeting glory, its brief moment of recognition, its modest cheque — risks poisoning the only motives capable of sustaining that solitary journey over time: the need for honest expression, and the joy of creation…
For those who accept prizes and for those who refuse them, the same thing holds: in the end, only the writing remains — to be tested against time, and against the readers who keep returning to it,”he concluded.
Tsomidis is not the first. Before him came Dinos Christianopoulos who, at 81, turned down Greece’s Grand Prize for Letters in 2011. “I want neither the prizes nor their money,” he said, pointing to a text he had written in 1979, titled Against: “I am against every honorary distinction, from wherever it comes. There is no more vulgar ambition than the desire to stand apart from others. That ghastly ancient imperative — to be better than the rest — demeans human dignity…”
There is something irresistible about refusal. Those who have pulled it off tend to be remembered for precisely that act. Even people who have never read a word of Jean-Paul Sartre know him for the letter he sent to the Swedish Academy in 1964 — declining the Nobel Prize in Literature before they could formally offer it, after his name had already leaked as the frontrunner.
Accepting any prize, Sartre believed, would tie his name to the institution conferring it. “A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an instrument,” he said, “even if it occurs under the most honourable circumstances. This position is entirely my own and holds no criticism of those who have already been awarded the prize.”
Then there was the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who declined his Nobel in 1926 with characteristic wit: “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite. But only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”
This article was originally published on 22.02.2026
Source: THE PRIZE REFUSERS
