The Awards Season is with us already, starting last week with the Q Magazine awards wherein the award-winning Arctic Monkeys pronounced the award-winning Take That “bollocks” and The National Television Awards where Deal Or No Deal was anointed the greatest programme presented by a man with a hairdo sculpted from angels’ wings.

From here to next February and the culmination of the tri-headed hydra of the Brits, Baftas and Oscars, it’s a new gong every day as the cultural mantelpiece collapses into firewood under the increasingly colossal weight of Trophy Bedlam which now gives us the Turner Prize, Booker Prize, Mobos, Mercury, Golden Globes, MTV Awards, Impac Prize, Sterling, Whitbread, Orange, TS Eliot Prize, any of the literally 9000 annual movie prizes which are distributed between 4500 films made annually and several thousand other prizes no one has ever heard of.

These days, this might involve a workplace near you as the relatively recent Employee Of The Month caper evolves ever-further into an annual jamboree wherein we’re all anointed by our own industries as Nurse/ Accountant/Postie Of The Year and have a glittering statue to prove it. Last week, yet another inaugural awards fandango was held in London, this one pithily titled the Press Gazette’s Magazine Design Awards Incorporating the Magazine Journalism Awards 2006 which proved to all present that as idiotic, unnecessary and psychologically disastrous as these events are, if you’re ever put on a shortlist, you always want to win.

Summoned as part of the team for Glamour magazine we were perched round the requisite circular table where the “comedy” competitive spirit concealed heavily suppressed violence, a baying throng more akin to bare-knuckle boxers in a Roman amphitheatre than a bunch of magazine chancers in fancy frocks.

And that was when we thought we might win. We lost, everything, comprehensively trounced as short-lists came and went, including the sort of publications you only hear about on Have I Got News For You? (Pharmacy Today, Goodwood Revival, Total Course Fishing etc) and the more we were trounced, the more we drank, the greatest humiliation of the night being the newly invented award given to new-kid-on-the-glossy-block Grazia magazine which is now, officially, Magazine Icon Of 2006, as we losers foamed in the face of our escalating, official un-coolness. “It’s possible to fail in many ways,” said the world’s No. 1 thinker, Aristotle, “while to succeed is possible only in one way.” By the winning, it seems, of any kind of preposterous award…

An award, these days, is our shortest of cultural shorthands in a hyper-speed world where awards in general are the new criticism, the new arbiters of taste and the new validation of worth itself. In books, especially, a Daz-bright “Winner!” splash on a new writer’s sleeve will take them where a hundred great reviews once did, in far less than a hundred seconds.

A pal of mine, Sian Pattenden, is a new children’s fiction writer up this week for yet another newly invented award, the Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards 2006 (In Association With The Irish Writer’s Centre), shortlisted for her Lemony Snickety, brilliantly barmy, The Awful Tale Of Agatha Bilke (Short Books). “Awards are increasingly used to validate authors,” Pattenden agrees, “it’s never, ‘This book’s great’ it’s, ‘This book won.’”

“It really can make or break you. But what are they judging the book on? Is it the work itself or is it to please the publishers? It seems like books, now, have to tick all the right boxes of whatever’s already tried and tested. They don’t tend to go for originality.

“But publishing something new that doesn’t always work is so important. People don’t need to read a blockbuster all the time.” Apart from the cash prizes, the prestige and the chance to earn more than the minimum wage forever, why do we all want to win? Are we tragic souls forever plastering over our psychological cracks with the Polyfilla of validation?

“It’s a basic human desire to sit above the pack,” Pattenden muses. “I’m sure they always handed out gongs to the leaders of the tribe and it’s just a mass trophy culture now. But if you read the newspapers it seems like the whole nation needs validation every minute of the day. You’d think we couldn’t bear to look at our wardrobes without looking at what Lindsay Lohan’s wearing. And I’m still not sure who she is. We don’t buy a book unless someone else said it’s good. We’re being instructed that we need all these things, every magazine has ‘must-have’ written all over it.

“But we haven’t actually lost our own minds. Word of mouth works and book clubs are great at making their own decisions. And look at Deal Or No Deal. No one said, watch Deal Or No Deal; that was never in the papers. And why would it be? Noel Edmonds was involved.”

This awards season, then, as we’re tuning into the endless hoopla which celebrates other people’s increasing success, know that every single person round that requisite circular table profoundly wants to win. And some of them actually will, waking up next morning to the glittering proof on their very own mantelpiece that they were good at something, once, because a committee of complete strangers said so. There it is, see? With your name engraved on it and everything. Or, as is more normally the case, with someone else’s name engraved on it and everything.