By Toh Hsien Min

I was at dinner one evening when a debate arose around Le Montrachet. This is a white wine made from just eight hectares of some of the most ludicrously expensively real estate in Burgundy by just twelve wine producers. A fellow dinner guest had been at a tasting that had assembled all twelve Le Montrachets from the 2004 vintage, and had pronounced the Marquis de Laguiche bottled by Joseph Drouhin the best of the lot. At which point, the guest next to me, who only happened to be a Master of Wine, said, no, you've just had twelve bottles of wine and you've decided that you like that one bottle best. Which, for the statistician that I am, makes a huge amount of sense, and the wine-lover well used to bottles of the same wine of the same vintage tasting different each time I uncork them finds the intuition even more complete.

It strikes me that much of the same dynamic is at play even in literature. I reread Yeats over and over because every time I come to his poetry I find something else that I hadn't picked up before; to the extent that I've thought recently of answering a question about favourite books by saying I wasn't sure about favourites but I could certainly identify books that I reread. But if it's the case that every reading is but an encounter full of all the variation that one can never appreciate without multiple engagements then it also makes the whole idea of literary competition a little bizarre.

Well, first, to be competing on criteria that are entirely qualitative, subject to exactly which judge is serving on the panel and whether he or she got out of bed on the right side the morning of the decision, is never really going to be definitive in the way that Usain Bolt crossing the finish line before Justin Gatlin or Manchester City putting the ball in the Liverpool net five times without reply is. But secondly, to be competing on what is in effect the opinions of a small group of people is, well, just about as inherently valuable as any other cluster of opinions of a small group of people at best. At worst, they're subject to the same problems as anything reliant on opinion - the loudest voices rather than the most meritorious arguments tend to win.

So why do people get het up about literary competitions? Newly garlanded Young Artist Joshua Ip has just this week found evidence of somebody setting up sock puppet accounts to diss the winners of the Epigram Books Fiction Prize on Goodreads while subtly praising two of losing novels on their respective shortlists (which only coincidentally happen to have some political agenda). The only thing noteworthy about some of the commentary contending that the EBFP is a two-bit prize - for avoidance of doubt I'm neither saying that it is nor saying that it isn't - is that perhaps the question should be which novel is likely to be read ten or twenty years from now. Which is a question for ten or twenty years from now.

Obviously this is an opinion, as is the selection of pieces for this or any issue of QLRS, which is why I typically try to achieve some balance in my reading by always reading every poetry submission multiple times (excepting those who ignore our guidelines and send poems in Word documents, which I open once). This issue, we have got a strong batch of poems, seen in how many of those selected did not need fourth or fifth readings to be included. The short stories Kai Chai has selected in the face of having to also produce a full-scale literary festival are in that context surprisingly lengthy, but also authentic in their own ways. Ranjani Rao's essay connects with some of the poems in perhaps the re-emergent global theme of immigration, and the critical reviews continue to pitch individual opinions into the fray of discourse. With luck, it's exactly the discourse that will be the winner.

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