The award-winning novelist Neil Griffiths is launching a new literary prize celebrating the “small presses producing brilliant and brave literary fiction” in the UK and Ireland – and is preparing to “guilt trip” some of the country’s bestselling writers into supporting it.

Griffiths, whose novel Betrayal in Naples won the Writers’ Club first novel award and whose Saving Caravaggio was shortlisted for the Costa best novel award, said he decided to found the new prize after realising that works from small presses represented the best fiction he had read in the last year.

Among his highlights were Zone by Mathias Énard, Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett and Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, published by the small presses Fitzcarraldo Editions and Galley Beggar Press. He also praised And Other Stories, Dalkey Archive, Coffee House Press and CB Editions, and said he understands the financial difficulties such imprints face.

“Publishing is a terrible business model,” he said. “These small presses are doing it often for the love of super-niche books, whether they’re in translation, or highly literary … We always hear about independent booksellers being under threat, but it’s essentially the same story for these publishers, [and] they’re even more vulnerable.”

He decided that “every time I read a Galley Beggar Press book, for example, that I think is extraordinary, I’m just going to pay £100 for it ... It was a small way of using my small amount of disposable income to demonstrate the value I think they’re bringing to the world of literature, and I did that for a couple of writers”.

But then, remembering the difference a Costa shortlisting had made to his own sales, he came up with the idea of an award. Called the Republic of Consciousness prize for best novel published by a small press, Griffiths intends that it will be judged by independent booksellers, with the first winner to be announced in January 2017.

“The winner will be chosen based on two criteria, perfectly expressed on the Galley Beggar website as ‘hardcore literary fiction and gorgeous prose’,” he writes on the award’s website. Participating UK and Irish publishers “will have a maximum of five full-time people working for them”, with one novel to be submitted per publisher per year.

The prize money will be split between author and press. Griffiths is currently putting up £2,000 of his own money, but is planning to persuade other writers to contribute. “I think I’m going to try and put a bit of a guilt trip on high-selling literary novelists, asking them to match what I’ve thrown in,” he said. “I’m hoping to get it up to about £10,000 … These quite niche, quite difficult literary novels are really important in terms of making sure we have a vibrant literary life, so let’s support them.”

Griffiths was previously published by Penguin, but said that his own new novel, Family of Love, will be placed with an independent press. “We need small presses: they are good at spotting the literary outliers,” he writes on his Republic of Consciousness site. “Their radar is calibrated differently from agents, or mainstream publishers. Small presses don’t ask how many copies will this sell, but how good is this – what is its value as literature? Quality is the only criterion.”