The Finder’s High: What Fringe Awards are Really About

If reviews at the Fringe feel chaotic, awards are straight-up cosmic. Who the fuck knows what’s going on there.

You’ve got almost 4,000 shows happening in three weeks. Any award being handed out is based on a tiny fraction of that total. Even if the winning show is excellent—and I’m sure it usually is—can anyone honestly say it was the best? Of course not. Nobody can see everything. The math alone makes the whole premise absurd.

Here’s one example. In 2024, before the festival began, my venue emailed all the artists saying that anyone debuting new writing could submit their script for the Popcorn Writing Award. I got excited. My show was new, the script was strong, and I thought, Why not?

Then the venue followed up: they’d received five times too many submissions, so they were just going to pull ten names out of a hat. No review of the scripts, no summaries read—just a literal random draw.

My show didn’t get picked. I’d paid $3,200 to perform at this venue, and they couldn’t even skim a paragraph before deciding who would “represent” them. 

I also learned that “new writing” was defined as having had fewer than six performances in the United Kingdom prior to the Fringe—which meant an international show that had toured for years elsewhere still counted as “new writing.”

Fast forward to 2025, when I was on the reviewer side. The editor of our publication decided he wanted to give out an award. Great. How would we determine the winner? He sent a message in our WhatsApp group asking, “Which shows do you think should get it?” Everyone threw in a few titles. A couple people named the same show. So that’s the one that won.

I saw that show on the last day of the festival. It was good—solid, creative—but it wasn’t head-and-shoulders above everything else. It just happened to be one that two reviewers had both seen and liked.

Then there was another show that won an Audience Choice Award. The day I saw it, a third of the audience walked out. I’d never seen so many people walk out of a show before. And it still won an audience choice award.

Was that show bad? No. Was it the best? Also no. Which is kind of the point. At Edinburgh, “best” doesn’t mean anything concrete. It’s just whatever a small cluster of people happens to see, like, and have the power to anoint.

And yet—knowing how arbitrary it all is—artists still want an award. Because at the Fringe, awards aren’t just trophies; they’re lifelines. They’re the thing that tells you the gamble was worth it. That the eight thousand plus pounds and three weeks of emotional unraveling meant something.

Everyone at the festival is chasing a feeling—audiences, reviewers, producers, award panels. They all want to discover something. To feel like they spotted the next Fleabag or Baby Reindeer before anyone else.

That’s why, to me, the awards start to feel less like recognition of excellence and more like a kind of collective self-mythologizing. Look what I found! Look what I elevated!

If I were giving out awards, I’d have one called The Social Value Award for a piece that gives society something it needs. Or another called The Audacious Award. Criteria: did the artist make something honest and risky, even if it failed? Congratulations, you win.

The truth is, the Fringe is just a microcosm. Every industry does this pageantry of prizes, this illusion of objectivity. Awards make chaos look organized. They give the people in power a sense of generosity, the work a sense of meaning, and the artists something to chase.

In the end, the awards aren’t so much about excellence as they are about belief—the belief that there’s still such a thing as “the best,” that meritocracy exists somewhere in the madness, and that chaos can be tamed if we just give it a trophy.