The Guardian First Book Award was a literary award presented by The Guardian newspaper. It annually recognised one book by a new writer. It was established in 1999, replacing the Guardian Fiction Award or Guardian Fiction Prize that the newspaper had sponsored from 1965. [1] The Guardian First Book Award was discontinued in 2016, with the 2015 awards being the last. [2]
The newspaper determined to change its book award after 1998, and during that year also hired Claire Armitstead as literary editor. At the inaugural First Book Award ceremony in 1999, she said that she was informed of the change, details to be arranged, by the head of the marketing department during her second week on the job. "By the time we left the room we had decided on two key things. We would make it a first book award, and we would involve reading groups in the judging process. This was going to be the people's prize." [1] About the opening of the prize to nonfiction she had said in August, "readers do not segregate their reading into fiction or non-fiction, so neither should we." [3] There was no restriction on genre; for example, both poetry and travel would be included in principle, [1] and so would self-published autobiographies. [3]
For the first rendition, 140 books were submitted, including a lot of nonfiction strongest "by far" in "a hybrid of travel-writing and reportage"; weak in science and biography. Experts led by Armitstead selected a longlist of 11 and Borders book stores in Glasgow, London, Brighton and Leeds hosted reading groups that considered one book a week, September to November, and selected a shortlist of six. A panel of eight judges including two Guardian editors chose the winner. [3] The newspaper called it "the first time the ordinary reading public have been involved in the selection of a major literary prize." In the event, the 1999 reading groups selected a shortlist including six novels, and all four groups favoured the novel Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. Their second favourite was one of the travelogue and reporting hybrids, by Philip Gourevitch of The New Yorker . [4] The judges chose the latter, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families —"a horrifying but humane account of the Rwandan genocide, its causes and consequences", the newspaper called it in August. [3]
The prize was worth £10,000 to the winner. Eligible titles were published in English, and in the UK within the calendar year. [5]
The Booker Prize, formerly known as the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a literary prize awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives international publicity which usually leads to a sales boost. When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014 it was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
The National Book Awards are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors.
The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, is an annual British book prize for the best non-fiction writing in the English language. It was founded in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award. With its motto "All the best stories are true", the prize covers current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. The competition is open to authors of any nationality whose work is published in the UK in English. The longlist, shortlist and winner is chosen by a panel of independent judges, which changes every year. Formerly named after English author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the award was renamed in 2015 after Baillie Gifford, an investment management firm and the primary sponsor. Since 2016, the annual dinner and awards ceremony has been sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
The Guardian Children's Fiction Prize or Guardian Award was a literary award that annual recognised one fiction book written for children or young adults and published in the United Kingdom. It was conferred upon the author of the book by The Guardian newspaper, which established it in 1965 and inaugurated it in 1967. It was a lifetime award in that previous winners were not eligible. At least from 2000 the prize was £1,500. The prize was apparently discontinued after 2016, though no formal announcement appears to have been made.
The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases". The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin (1879–1954), who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career (1901). She bequeathed her estate to fund this award. As of 2016, the award is valued A$60,000.
John Burnside FRSL FRSE is a Scottish writer. He is one of only three poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book.
Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet, fiction writer, essayist and blogger. He is also a professor of creative writing.
Meg Rosoff is an American writer based in London, United Kingdom. She is best known for the novel How I Live Now, which won the Guardian Prize, Printz Award, and Branford Boase Award and made the Whitbread Awards shortlist. Her second novel, Just in Case, won the annual Carnegie Medal from the British librarians recognising the year's best children's book published in the UK.
Andrés Neuman is a Spanish-Argentine writer, poet, translator, columnist and blogger.
The Desmond Elliott Prize is an annual award for the best debut novel written in English and published in the UK. The winning novel can be from any genre of fiction and must exhibit depth and breadth with a compelling narrative. The winner receives £10,000. The prize is named in honour of the distinguished late publisher and literary agent, Desmond Elliott.
Zukiswa Wanner is a South African journalist, novelist and editor born in Zambia and now based in Kenya. Since 2006, when she published her first book, her novels have been shortlisted for awards including the South African Literary Awards (SALA) and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In 2015, she won the K Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award for London Cape Town Joburg (2014). In 2014, Wanner was named on the Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define trends in African literature. In 2020, she was awarded the Goethe Medal alongside Ian McEwan and Elvira Espejo Ayca, making Wanner the first African woman to win the award.
The NGC Bocas Lit Fest is the Trinidad and Tobago literary festival that takes place annually during the last weekend of April in Port of Spain. Inaugurated in 2011, it is the first major literary festival in the southern Caribbean and largest literary festival in the Anglophone Caribbean. A registered non-profit company, the festival has as its title sponsor the National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago (NGC). Other sponsors and partners include First Citizens Bank, One Caribbean Media (OCM), who sponsor the associated OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, CODE, and the Commonwealth Foundation.
The 2012 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 16 October 2012. A longlist of twelve titles was announced on 25 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 11 September. The jury was chaired by Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, accompanied by literary critics Dinah Birch and Bharat Tandon, historian and biographer Amanda Foreman, and Dan Stevens, actor of Downton Abbey fame with a background English Literature studies. The jury was faced with the controversy of the 2011 jury, whose approach had been seen as overly populist. Whether or not as a response to this, the 2012 jury strongly emphasised the value of literary quality and linguistic innovation as criteria for inclusion.
The Rathbones Folio Prize, previously known as the Folio Prize and The Literature Prize, is a literary award that was sponsored by the London-based publisher The Folio Society for its first two years, 2014–2015. Starting in 2017 the sponsor is Rathbone Investment Management.
Ellah Wakatama, OBE, Hon. FRSL, is Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press. A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, she was Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia. The former deputy editor of Granta magazine, she was senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and assistant editor at Penguin. She is series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of the anthologies Africa39 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.
Maya Jaggi is a British writer, literary critic, editor and cultural journalist. In the words of the Open University, from which Jaggi received an honorary doctorate in 2012, she "has had a transformative influence in the last 25 years in extending the map of international writing today". Jaggi has been a contributor to a wide range of publications including The Guardian, Financial Times, The Independent, The Literary Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, New Statesman, Wasafiri, Index on Censorship, and Newsweek, and is particularly known for her profiles of writers, artists, film-makers, musicians and others. She is also a broadcaster and presenter on radio and television. Jaggi is the niece of actor and food writer Madhur Jaffrey.
Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ is a Nigerian writer. Her 2017 debut novel, Stay With Me, won the 9mobile Prize for Literature and the Prix Les Afriques. She was awarded The Future Awards Africa Prize for Arts and Culture in 2017.
Claire Armitstead is a British journalist and author. She is Associate Editor (Culture) at The Guardian, where she has worked since 1992. She is also a cultural commentator on literature and the arts, and makes appearances on radio and television, as well as leading workshops and chairing literary events in the UK and at international festivals. She has judged literary competitions including the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the PEN Pinter Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Terra Nullius is a 2017 speculative fiction novel by Claire G. Coleman. It draws from Australia's colonial history, describing a society split into "Natives" and "Settlers."
