A literary award or literary prize is an award presented in recognition of a particularly lauded literary piece or body of work. It is normally presented to an author.
Most literary awards come with a corresponding award ceremony. Many awards are structured with one organization (usually a non-profit organization) as the presenter and public face of the award, and another organization as the financial sponsor or backer, who pays the prize remuneration and the cost of the ceremony and public relations, typically a corporate sponsor who may sometimes attach their name to the award (such as the Orange Prize).
There are awards for various writing formats including poetry and novels. Many awards are also dedicated to a certain genre of fiction or non-fiction writing (such as science fiction or politics). There are also awards dedicated to works in individual languages, such as the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spanish), [1] the Camões Prize (Portuguese), [2] the Booker Prize, [3] the Folio Prize, [4] the Pulitzer Prize and the Hugo Awards (English). [5]
Other international literary prizes include the Nobel Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. The International Dublin Literary Award is given to writers, as well as to the translator(s) if the book chosen was written in a language other than English.
Spoof awards include: The Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, and the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction and Lyttle Lytton Contests, given to deliberately bad grammar
There are also literary awards targeted specifically to encourage the writing from African-American origin and authors of African descent. Two of these awards are Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, which was established in 2007 by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, and Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, which is a given by the National Community of Black Writers.
Australian author Richard Flanagan wrote a critique of literary awards, saying "National prizes are often a barometer of bourgeois bad taste." He says juries can be influenced by vendettas, paybacks and payoffs, "most judges are fair-minded people. But hate, conceit and jealousy are no less human attributes than wisdom, judgment and knowledge." [6] Book prizes will sometimes compete with one another, and these goals do not always coincide with anointing the best winner. Sometimes juries can not decide between two contentious books so they will compromise with a third inoffensive bland book. He says there are now so many awards and prizes it has diluted the prestige of being a prize-winning book. Flanagan clarifies he is not against literary awards, but believes they should not be taken too seriously as a form of support for literary culture.
Richard Miller Flanagan is an Australian writer, who has also worked as a film director and screenwriter. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Ruth Scurr, Lady Stothard FRSL is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Francis Spufford FRSL is an English author and teacher of writing whose career has seen him shift gradually from non-fiction to fiction. His first novel Golden Hill received critical acclaim and numerous prizes including the Costa Book Award for a first novel, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Monique Roffey is a Trinidadian-born British writer and memoirist. Her novels have been much acclaimed, winning awards including the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, for Archipelago, and the Costa Book of the Year award, for The Mermaid of Black Conch in 2021.
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 was Rathbone Investment Management. At the 2023 award ceremony, it was announced that the prize was looking for new sponsorship as Rathbones would be ending their support.
Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican author living in the United States. She is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks and the novel Faces in the Crowd, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Luiselli's 2015 novel The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Fiction, and she was awarded the Premio Metropolis Azul in Montreal, Quebec. Luiselli's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, with her work appearing in publications including, The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New Yorker. Her book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Luiselli's 2020 novel, Lost Children Archive won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2014.
Diana Omo Evans FRSL is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written four full-length novels. Her first novel, 26a, published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. A House for Alice was published in 2023.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2015.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2016.
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is a Zimbabwean writer and professor of creative writing. She is the author of Shadows, a novella and House of Stone, a novel.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2017.
Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year,The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.
Ashleigh Young is a poet, essayist, editor and creative writing teacher. She received the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in 2017 for her second book, a collection of personal essays titled Can You Tolerate This? which also won the Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-Fiction. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand.
Sinéad Gleeson is an Irish writer. Her essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Lifewon Non-Fiction Book of the Year at 2019 Irish Book Awards and the Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer. It was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It was published in the US by Mariner books and translated into several languages. She is the editor of The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers, The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland and The Art of Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2020.
Stephanie Sy-Quia is a British–American writer. Born in California and now living in London, Sy-Quia attended the King's School, Canterbury then went on to study English at Oxford.
| Production | |
|---|---|
| Consumption | |
| By country | |
| Other |
|
| Related | |
