The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism is awarded for literary criticism by the University of Iowa on behalf of the Truman Capote Literary Trust. The value of the award is $30,000 (USD), and is said to be the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language. [1] The formal name of the prize is the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, commemorating both Capote and his friend Newton Arvin, who was a distinguished critic and Smith College professor until he lost his job in 1960 after his homosexuality was publicly exposed. [2]
Truman Garcia Capote was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966). His works have been adapted into more than 20 films and television productions.
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a graduate-level creative writing program. At 87 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States. Its acceptance rate is between 2.7% and 3.7%. On the university's behalf, the workshop administers the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.
Sir Geoffrey William Hill, FRSL was an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation and was called the "greatest living poet in the English language." From 2010 to 2015 he held the position of Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Following his receiving the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2009 for his Collected Critical Writings, and the publication of Broken Hierarchies , Hill is recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry and criticism in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the study of "women as writers".
Fredrick Newton Arvin was an American literary critic and academic. He achieved national recognition for his studies of individual nineteenth-century American authors.
Edilberto Kaindong Tiempo was a Filipino writer and professor. He and his wife, Edith L. Tiempo, are credited by Silliman University with establishing "a tradition in excellence in creative writing and the teaching of literacy craft which continues to this day" at that university.
Elaine Scarry is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain, and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science and the Law. She was formerly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
Declan Kiberd is an Irish writer and scholar with an interest in modern Irish literature, both in the English and Irish languages, which he often approaches through the lens of postcolonial theory. He is also interested in the academic study of children's literature. He serves on the advisory board of the International Review of Irish Culture and is a professor at the University of Notre Dame and at its campus in Dublin. In recent years and with publications such as After Ireland (2018), Kiberd has become a commentator on contemporary Irish social and political issues, particularly as such issues have been examined by Ireland's writers.
Allen Wier, was an American writer and a professor. He was the Watkins Endowed Visiting Writer at Murray State University from 2016 until 2020; he is Professor Emeritus having taught at the University of Tennessee from 1994 until 2015, and the University of Alabama from 1980 to 1994. and Hollins College from 1975 to 1980 and Carnegie Mellon University from 1974 to 1975. He taught in the University of New Orleans summer writing workshop in Edinburgh, Scotland in Summer of 2013. He was visiting writer at the University of Texas in 1983 and at Florida International University from 1984 1985.
Stanley Plumly was an American poet and the director of University of Maryland, College Park's creative writing program.
Dame Gillian Patricia Kempster Beer, is a British literary critic and academic. She was President of Clare Hall from 1994 to 2001, and King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1994 to 2002.
Seth Lerer is an American scholar and Professor of English. He specializes in historical analyses of the English language, and in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he served as the Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014. He previously held the Avalon Foundation Professorship in Humanities at Stanford University. Lerer won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Children’s Literature: A Readers’ History from Aesop to Harry Potter.
Helen Wenda Small is the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Merton College, Oxford. She was previously a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.
Douglas Kearney is an American poet, performer and librettist. Kearney grew up in Altadena, California. His work has appeared in Nocturnes, Jubilat, Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Callaloo, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, Scapegoat, Obsidian, Boundary 2, Jacket2, Lana Turner, Brooklyn Rail, and Indiana Review.In 2012, his and Anne LeBaron's opera, Crescent City, premiered and received widespread praise. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota.
The Truman Capote Literary Trust is an American charitable trust established in 1994 by Truman Capote's literary executor, Alan U. Schwartz, pursuant to Capote's will.
Philip Fisher is the Felice Crowl Reid Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University and an author.
Anna North is an American writer, editor, and reporter who is currently a senior reporter at Vox specializing in covering gender-related issues.
Merritt Tierce is an American short story author, story editor, essayist, activist, and novelist. Tierce was born in Texas and attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, receiving her MFA in Fiction in 2011. She previously taught at the University of Iowa. She was a founding board member of the Texas Equal Access Fund and previously worked as Executive Director of the TEA. She currently resides in Los Angeles and is a writer for Orange is the New Black.
Bennett Sims is an American fiction writer with three book publications, the novel A Questionable Shape (2013) and the short story collections White Dialogues and Other Minds and Other Stories. He is an assistant professor at the University of Iowa.
Heather Clark is an American writer, literary critic and academic. Her biography of poet Sylvia Plath, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (2011) and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972 (2006).