June is usually the cruellest month in the publishing world. The carefree summer lies ahead, the partying, lecturing and autographing at picturesque regional book festivals. But first the literary pecking order must be established. Just one hissed question is on all lips at the month’s many book parties: who will win?

June is when prizes worth a lucrative £120,000 ($220,000) are awarded. Winning the Orange or the Samuel Johnson prizes is worth £30,000 ($55,000) a time. The new Man Booker International prize, awarded once every two years, is worth £60,000 ($110,000). These are life-changing sums of money for people scribbling in garrets. Even losers are winners, as every publisher likes to remind nervous authors; even being short-listed will substantially increase sales.

There’s just one catch. London’s biggest book awards (these three, October’s British Man Booker award of £50,000/$90,000 and the January Whitbread prize of £30,000/$55,000) appear designed to exclude as much as to enthuse; a mirror, perhaps, of an insular society with secretive, snobbish traditions. The annual Man Booker prize, open to fiction writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, was, until the creation of a parallel international prize this year, in practice the prize that rewarded all English-language fiction that was not American. And the Orange prize is for novelists - as long as they are not men. And feeling left out makes people angry, especially in a touchy community of writers whose collective appetite for vinegary white wine and tribal feuding would put many a warlord to shame.

So June has traditionally been a time for invective, fallings-out, and gratuitous viciousness.

It is a given that opponents of positive discrimination will spend June roundly cursing the Orange Prize (Simon Jenkins’s columns in this paper have carried many a furious condemnation of this “blot on Britain’s literary landscape”). Novelist Kate Mosse, long the driving force behind the Orange, says she started off by believing its consciousness-raising, bookselling boost would be welcomed by both male and female readers. “I was naïve,” she says. “I thought everyone concerned about reading books would be happy that there was a new prize. But the first question anyone asked was, ‘are you a lesbian?’”

Those whose biggest fear was the Great Satan rather than Her Indoors, used to tremble at the idea of American novelists being allowed to compete for the Booker and crushing the British literary scene with the sheer size and brilliance of their output. When the notion of an international prize surfaced in 2002, the top judge, Professor Lisa Jardine, protested: “with someone like (Philip) Roth at his best, I can’t see how a (Martin) Amis or (Ian) McEwan would touch them.” “What have these people been reading, or smoking?” replied a surprised Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley. But the fears persisted.

This year, however, none of the usual skirmishes have begun.

The Booker prize sponsors, financial-services Man Group, gave up on trying to get the Brits to share the prize with Americans – and introduced a second prize instead, for a whopping £60,000, which was given out on June 2 in Washington DC.

This new prize recognises a lifetime of achievement, not a single book. The 18-writer shortlist, which read like an authors’ Who’s Who, included Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike – the writers most feared by Britain’s literary protectionists. There was as much discussion of who was left off the list as of who was included. Those who didn’t make the cut included Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose, Nobel prizewinner Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie. One judge – the Iranian Azar Nafisi – said picking a shortlist from the world’s greatest living writers was like “the more or less random slaughtering of our loved ones.”

Until his death in April, Saul Bellow was the 5-1 favorite. But when the prize was finally awarded in Washington DC last week, British writers breathed a collective sigh of relief. The surprise winner was the little-known Albanian, Ismail Kadare.

So now transatlantic peace has broken out. “By making a less fashionable choice, and demonstrating that ' international ' doesn’t have to mean ' American ' , the judges allowed writers to raise their expectations of this prize,” the Observer’s Stephanie Merritt commented approvingly.

And it’s been just as cosy with the Orange prize, awarded on Tuesday night. It went to Lionel Shriver, a 48-year-old woman from North Carolina, for the novel We Need To Talk About Kevin – examining the admittedly not very cosy relationship between wealthy New Yorker Eva Khatchadourian and her son, who kills nine people at his high school. And, so far, no one has moaned about a woman getting all that prize money.

By the time I wafted into the marquee in Portman Square at the tail end of the prize-giving, the mood of the assembled literati was as golden and relaxed as the post-rush-hour evening. “Didn’t anyone bring up the positive-discrimination thing?” I asked. "That’s all died away now,” said Jane Morpeth, who buys fiction books for Headline Review. “ No one can be bothered fighting any more .”

But if she’s right, and there’s no war any more in literary London, what will people talk about at book festivals all summer?

Slices of London: e-mail Urban Fox here