When BTS, the K-pop boyband, refused to submit their music for consideration in the 2026 Grammy Awards, artists worldwide were filled with pride but also envy. Many know that to walk away from the table, one must first be invited to sit down. For artists outside the West, the Grammys, the Oscars, and major literary prizes represent something far more coercive than mere vanity.

Art requires no institutional seal to be profound. The best art in the world is likely unknown to the mainstream. In late capitalism, however, discoverability has come to be a major factor in dictating an artist’s success. While BTS has enough clout to turn down the Grammys, many artists—operating in domestic ecosystems that lack the infrastructure for global marketing and distribution—know that major prizes do not merely recognise creative excellence but also manufacture further success: for instance, foreign-rights advances, festival marquee placement, and prime spots in retail outlets.

BTS has been nominated at the Grammys before, but has never won. Their decision not to submit this year was a reaction to the introduction of a new Best Asian Pop Music Performance category. “We hope our music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language,” they said in a statement. This move has been supported by fans as a principled stance against the othering of Asian artists in Western markets but, in the context of major awards, it’s worth considering those who might never have been eligible in the first place.

Organic global reach may not be real. The visibility gap across artistic spheres does not stem from an uneven distribution of talent but from the cold arithmetic of wealth and operations. In creative capitalism, success builds success. Early structural visibility compounds exponentially, and the capacity to achieve such visibility is not evenly spread across the world.

BTS did not conquer Western airwaves in an institutional vacuum. They emerged from a nation that had spent decades assembling a cultural export engine. The band worked hard but also had a system to benefit from, unlike artists in regions like Southeast Asia. Many Southeast Asian artists have no supportive infrastructure for boosting; in some cases, their own governments view them with indifference or active suspicion. Without the resources to amplify output, hard work alone is rarely enough to achieve breakout success.

Yet, as the Grammys demonstrate, even a worldwide sensation like BTS can run into the glass ceiling of Western gatekeeping. If even BTS must fight to be truly equal, where does that leave the rest of us?

While many focus on the ways non-anglophone literature can “go global” if picked up for translation, more thought needs to be given to something more quietly insidious: prizes.

On the surface, literary prizes seem like wonderful megaphones. Often, one sees people celebrate a book they discovered because of a prize. However, at literary festivals internationally, I have watched serious bibliophiles and readers who consider themselves politically informed recoil in disbelief when confronted with the entry requirements of the world’s most celebrated literary prizes.

The Booker Prize, for instance, mandates that a novel be written originally in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland by a recognised imprint. (Even if the parent company is British or Irish, only imprints registered in the UK or Ireland will be eligible to submit titles.) Although it does not name or market itself as this, the Booker Prize is, in practice, the UK and Ireland Book Prize for several reasons, starting with how gatekeeping exists from the most fundamental level of deciding what gets published in those countries in the first place.

Many, many authors who have no associations with these countries discuss rejections they have received from UK or Irish publishers. A common denominator: they wrote about life outside of these places, chronicling local complexities. In other words, they were Asians writing about life in Asia, or Africans writing about life in Africa. Securing a UK or Irish publishing contract is an extraordinary anomaly for such writers. British and Irish publishers are accountable to their bottom lines, and as such mind what their (British and Irish) readership want, which is suspected to be something more obviously relatable.

Learning of the Booker’s bottleneck, readers often ask: “What about the International Booker then?” The moniker suggests embrace, the word “international” connoting a warmer and more inclusive approach to global talent. In truth, its criteria impose an equally restrictive administrative sieve: the submission must have originally been written in a language other than English, translated into English, and published by a UK or Irish press. Here is where—if we can give the International Booker the benefit of the doubt that being published by a UK or Irish press does not immediately prompt expectations, conscious or otherwise, of some exoticisation—we face a reality many have not considered: many authors who are “international” write in English.

For various reasons—colonial history, contemporary childhood upbringing, the multitude of places where English is still perceived as the language of opportunity—an increasing number of people are educated in and write in English. A postcolonial catch-22 cruelly surfaces in the International Booker’s eligibility criteria. Across large swaths of former colonies—such as India, Pakistan, and Singapore—English is the medium of national intellectual life, education, and literary expression. Ironically, writers who inherited the language of the empire are now excluded by one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes.

When anglophone institutions turn their attention towards the wider world, they rely heavily on a familiar compromise: the elevation of the diaspora. This is relatable, or at least ‘relevant’ , to the aforementioned publishers.

Confronted with demands for racial and cultural diversity, gatekeepers routinely select artists who are first- or second-generation immigrants. The outputs of these creators frequently focus on the friction of immigration: generational estrangement, hyphenated identities, racial code-switching, and the melancholic excavation of an ancestral homeland. These narratives are vital, artistic contributions to the countries where their authors reside, but cannot be substitutes for the literature of non-diasporic writers, who inhabit an entirely distinct ontological universe. Anglophone publishers and institutions should not be able to pat themselves on the back for ticking the diversity box simply because they’ve included a few diaspora writers.

In fact, it is highly morally and ethically wrong to see diasporic writers be celebrated in lieu of non-diasporic writers. The substitution never comes overtly, but through celebrations of diversity being achieved when a diasporic writer, with an immigration-related story that the West can relate to or sees its involvement in, has some spotlight, while the majority of the world could not contend in the first place.

Whether or not these substitutions are done consciously or unconsciously by the industry, we, writers of the non-diaspora, cannot accept this, for our long-lost cousins should not substitute for us. It perpetuates a dynamic with the West where we only exist in relation to them. The ‘same kind of face’ does not mean the same stories or experiences.

In cities worldwide, literary and arts festivals design their programmes around headliners certified by metropolitan prizes. An author who lacks a Booker nomination or a film director without a Cannes premiere might struggle to pack an auditorium, regardless of their mastery. Event organisers, operating on lean municipal grants and ticket revenues, must trade in the universal currency of Western acclaim. The colonial relationship is replicated on home soil: domestic audiences learn to evaluate their own storytellers through the seal of approval granted by institutions thousands of miles away.

To demand that artists in under-resourced regions ignore these dynamics and ‘focus purely on the craft’ is a romantic delusion. It demands an exhausting level of psychological fortitude, requiring an artist not only to produce serious work amid financial precarity, but to suppress the bitterness that comes from watching better-resourced works elevated by institutional engines—not for the sake of craft.

The true loss belongs not only to the artists who fail to secure a place on an overseas prize roster, but also to our collective intellectual life. When the machinery of global validation systematically excludes many—quietly, sometimes under a guise of generosity—it ensures that our enjoyment of the arts is curated by a handful of metropolitan committees catering to their own domestic market anxieties and ability to relate to other humans.

BTS can walk away from the Grammys because they already possess an alternative empire. For the rest of the world’s creators, there is nowhere to withdraw to. We remain trapped inside a cultural geography where the most urgent stories are precisely the ones the global clearinghouses were never built to amplify, and so maybe, even if feeling slighted, we would take the title of the ‘Best Asian’ something.

• Tags: Issue 45, South Korea, Thammika Songkaeo