I wouldn’t ever want to complain about all the reading I had to do as a judge of the Folio prize. How wonderful to be paid to read – assuming, of course, that reading’s your thing (I hardly want to do anything else). But there is no denying that some weeks I felt wary of the boxes of books that glowered at me from a corner of my sitting room. Gobble a lot of fiction very quickly – we read 80 novels and short story collections in about four months – and you soon find yourself suffering from the literary equivalent of a food intolerance. Oh no, you think, not another novel about X or Y. At these moments, only one thing keeps you going: the faint hope that the book in question might turn out to be the greatest novel ever written about X or Y.

This is the first stage of the process, and it’s good when it’s over. Stage two happens without your noticing. As the weeks tick on, a list of books forms in your mind, one to which you grow unreasonably attached. Once this has happened, you’re already at the beginning of stage three: the Great Letting Go. It sounds dumb now, but I agreed to judge the Folio prize thinking it would be simple. We judges had merely to find the best book; excellence would be our only standard. Somehow, I failed to register that I would not be sitting in a room with four other Rachels, all with the same likes and dislikes as me. At the first judges’ meeting, during which we drew up our long list, I felt something close to panic as my darlings were thrown out, scythed by the passionate dislike or, worse, the indifference of my colleagues William Fiennes, Mohsin Hamid, AM Homes and Deborah Levy. After the shortlist meeting, I had to walk home the long way to burn off the adrenaline. Not even knowing that everyone else was feeling exactly same – we all sustained casualties – made it any the less excruciating.

Stage four – picking one winner from a shortlist of eight – is the worst. A weird omertà surrounds literary prizes; no one ever dares to suggest in public that a jury was split. Why? It simply can’t be the case that the winner is always the one every single judge wanted to see blazing through. Nor is this a bad thing; I took the prolonged agony of our final meeting – it lasted three hours – as a sign of the greatness, the essential rightness, of our shortlist. It was, in any case, a torture that only added to the sweetness last Monday night when Akhil Sharma went up to receive his prize. In the moment, doubts fall away. Watching him – he blinked disbelievingly, as if even now he could jinx it – I felt exhausted, but content. How brilliant that Family Life, a funny, savage, masterfully controlled novel about an Indian boy whose brother befalls a terrible accident soon after their family’s arrival in America, will now find so many new readers. It is a book they will find easy to like, even to love.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Akhil Sharma with his award for the ‘funny, savage’ Family Life. Photograph: Robin Mayes/PA

Stage five. The dust settles. The days feel baggier, more expansive, without those cairns of books. Yet I can’t stop going over it all. I still wish that those who run the Folio prize had not decided to make public the 80 titles we were reading (books that were nominated by members of the Folio academy, all of whom are writers). Prizes should be about supporting authors, not making their lives more painful. How miserable not to appear on such a huge list – one that is no use at all to the reading public either, being so unmanageably long. I hope they will think again about this, and that academy members who agree with me will make their feelings known.

I worry about what we might be losing. The British social history novel seems doomed so far as our prize culture goes; impossible to imagine a writer such as David Lodge enjoying the same career today. Character is also on the wane; 21st-century writers prefer to build their stories around themes (perhaps this is one reason I fell so hard for, among others, Colm Tóibín’s breathtaking Nora Webster). My hunch is that, in the future, well-supported American writers are, for a variety of different and complex reasons, going to do very well out of the Folio and the Booker combined, and that this will have consequences for writing and publishing in this country. It may also, in the end, affect the way that we, as British readers, talk to and think about ourselves. It’s vital to look out into the world, but we need sometimes to look within, too.

Against this, however, must be set the fact that writers really are growing new forms in the laboratories of their minds. There is daring out there, if you look for it. No one could read our shortlist and not feel excited. I cherish the fact that in the last few months I’ve read so many truly astonishing things (books I might not otherwise have picked up in a million years). Sometimes, walking to the bus stop, I think of Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, in which a Christian pastor travels to a far-off planet to convert its alien population, whose language he cannot speak and whose faces he cannot read. Even now, I never know whether to smile, or to frown.