Do first-time writers have a sell-by date? You could be forgiven for thinking so. This week Buzzfeed posted a list of “20 under 40 Debut Writers You Need To Be Reading”. Making a debut is a huge achievement at any stage in life, and it would be churlish not to celebrate all of them, but something about the age limit makes me uneasy.

Buzzfeed is not alone: the New Yorker and Granta each publish lists of writers under 40, but I’ve yet to see one celebrating the over-50s. Is writing a beauty contest? Is it a sports competition? Beauty, and sporting achievement might be associated, in our culture, with youth (and, even that’s not a given) but there’s no reason this should go for the written word too.

In our long-lived, serial-career age, these lists say something about how we’re beginning to think of writing – as a young person’s game, perhaps with some sort of dimly imaginable career structure via which you might graduate to the best of 20 over 40, or 60, if there were such lists. This would be all well and good if a writing “career” had any kind of recognisable trajectory. Solicitors worry if they haven’t made partner, footballers if they haven’t got into the first team by a certain age, because those jobs have recognisable structures, but who can say that it’s “better” or “worse” to be Charles Bukowski (first novel published aged 49) or Zadie Smith (first novel published aged 24), or EM Forster, whose last novel was published when he was 45, though he lived until the age of 91, or Jean Rhys, who, after success as a young writer was widely believed to have died soon after the publication of Good Morning Midnight (1939), before returning with the internationally acclaimed Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). They’re all brilliant, so it’s impossible to say.

Age-based lists are as silly and as terrifying as those big round zeros that gape at us across the years from time to time (why not, after all, highlight new writers under 37, or 42?). More seriously, restricting the celebration of achievement to authors under a certain age carries a number of inbuilt, and I’m sure unintentional, injustices.

“What the aristocrats take for granted, we pay for with our youth,” US writer John Barth said, quoting Chekhov, in a Paris Review interview and adding: “I had to pay my tuition in literature that way.” Sometimes the literary bitcoin is just life: some people have more to say aged 50, than at 30; for others it’s the opposite. But what about the writers who are slowed down because they have to do a day job? What about the authors (mainly women) whose writing time is interrupted for long periods by care for children, or relatives? What about those writers who take years unshackling themselves from backgrounds that make writing seem an impossible dream? Creative writing degrees offer one way for younger writers to start taking their work seriously, but few over-40s had access to these, and even today many must think twice, or more, about the debt required to embark on them.

Many writers facing these obstacles will still publish a first book before the age of 40, but some will not, and this should not reduce their achievement. Debut writers should feel that in some measure they have already won: their books have been published. This arbitrary hurdle of age, which can never be unjumped, is something no author should have to face.

I’m excited when I read a new voice I love, whether it speaks through bee-stung lips, or false teeth, or anything in-between. The most exciting debut novel I’ve read recently is The Wallcreeper, Nell Zink’s mordantly hilarious story of sex, drugs, and birdwatching. Zink was born in 1964. How about celebrating a writing life that has just begun at 50?