The Martin Luther King Memorial Prize was instituted by novelist John Brunner and his wife and was awarded annually to a literary work published in the US or Britain that was deemed to improve interracial understanding, [1] [2] "reflecting the ideals to which Dr. Martin Luther King dedicated his life". [3] As of 1984, the author of the winning work was awarded £100 (equivalent to £330in 2020). [3] Brunner died in 1995, and it is uncertain if the award has continued.
Winners of the prize have included:
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1985.
Robert William Geoffrey Gray is an Australian poet, freelance writer, and critic. He has been described as "an Imagist without a rival in the English-speaking world" and "one of the contemporary masters of poetry in English".
The Conrad-Ferdinand-Meyer-Preis is a literary award in memory of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.
Caryl Phillips is a Kittitian-British novelist, playwright and essayist. Best known for his novels, Phillips is often described as a black Atlantic writer, since much of his fictional output is defined by its interest in, and searching exploration of, the experiences of peoples of the African diaspora in England, the Caribbean and the United States. As well as writing, Phillips has worked as an academic at numerous institutions including Amherst College, Barnard College, and Yale University, where he has held the position of Professor of English since 2005.
The Eagle Awards were a series of awards for comic book titles and creators. They were awarded by UK fans voting for work produced during the previous year. Named after the UK's Eagle comic, they were launched in 1977 for comics released in 1976.
Derek Humphry is a British-born American journalist and author notable as a proponent of legal assisted suicide and the right to die philosophy. In 1980, he co-founded the Hemlock Society and, in 2004, after that organization dissolved, he co-founded the Final Exit Network. From 1988 to 1990, he was president of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies and is the current president of the Euthanasia Research & Guidance Organization (ERGO).
David Dabydeen is a Guyanese-born broadcaster, novelist, poet and academic. He was formerly Guyana's Ambassador to UNESCO from 1997 to 2010 and the youngest Member of the UNESCO Executive Board (1993–1997), elected by the General Council of all Member States of UNESCO. He was appointed Guyana's Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinaire to China, from 2010 to 2015. He is one of the longest serving diplomats in the history of Guyana, most of his work done in a voluntary unpaid capacity.
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution is a history book by Simon Schama. It was the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award winner for general nonfiction. A 2007 drama-documentary television programme was based on it.
The Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, was established by the will of Mary P. Sears, and named after the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The prize is given to a living American poet selected with reference to genius and need, and is currently worth (2014) between $6,000 and $9,000. The selection is made by a jury of three poets: one each appointed by the presidents of Radcliffe and Berkeley, and the third by the Board of Governors of the Society.
Clayborne Carson is an American academic who is a professor of history at Stanford University and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. Since 1985, he has directed the Martin Luther King Papers Project, a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of Martin Luther King Jr.
The Meldola Medal and Prize was awarded annually from 1921 to 1979 by the Chemical Society and from 1980 to 2008 by the Royal Society of Chemistry to a British chemist who was under 32 years of age for promising original investigations in chemistry. It commemorated Raphael Meldola, President of the Maccabaeans and the Institute of Chemistry. The prize was the sum of £500 and a bronze medal.
The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize established in 1978, is the largest and oldest playwriting prize for women+ writing for English-speaking theatre. Named for Susan Smith Blackburn (1935–1977), alumna of Smith College, who died of breast cancer.
The European Tribe is the first book of essays by Caryl Phillips, published in 1987. Characterised by Andrea Lee in The New York Times as "part travelogue, part cri de coeur", the collection chronicles the author's journey through multiracial Europe of the 1980s, "guided by a moral compass rather than a map" and "seeking personal definition within the parameters of growing up black in Europe". Maya Jaggi of The Guardian has called it "a coolly indignant dissection of the 'sickness in Europe's soul'".
The history of the 1954 to 1968 American civil rights movement has been depicted and documented in film, song, theater, television, and the visual arts. These presentations add to and maintain cultural awareness and understanding of the goals, tactics, and accomplishments of the people who organized and participated in this nonviolent movement.
Ferdinand Dennis is a writer, broadcaster, journalist and lecturer, who is Jamaican by birth but at the age of eight moved to England, where his parents had migrated in the late 1950s. Dr James Procter notes: "Perhaps as a result of his Caribbean background, Dennis is a writer ultimately more concerned with routes than roots. This is foregrounded in much of his fictional work, notably his most recent and ambitious novel to date, Duppy Conqueror (1998), a novel which moves from 1930s Jamaica to postwar London and Liverpool, to Africa. Similarly, Dennis' non-fiction centres on journeying rather than arrival, from Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain (1988) to Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa (2000)."
A Dry White Season is a fictional novel written by Afrikaner novelist André Brink and first published by Taurus in 1979. The title quotes a line from the struggle poem For Don M. - Banned by Mongane Wally Serote. The novel focuses on the death during detention of a man wrongly suspected of being a black activist. The novel challenges apartheid, depicting the transformation of a ruling class Afrikaner's opposition to the governing, white supremacist regime. The novel was initially banned in South Africa, though Brink had 3,000 copies published through an underground press.
Stella Dadzie is a British educationalist, activist, writer and historian. She is best known for her involvement in the UK's Black Women's Movement, being a founding member of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) in the 1970s and co-authoring The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain with Suzanne Scafe and Beverley Bryan. In 2020, Verso published a new book by Dadzie, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance.
The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain was a 1985 book by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe. A socio-historical study, it looked at the realities of life for Black women in the United Kingdom after the Second World War.