The
Hawthornden Prize is a
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
literary awardA literary award is an award presented to an author who has written a particularly lauded piece or body of work. There are awards for forms of writing ranging from poetry to novels. Many awards are also dedicated to a certain genre of fiction or non-fiction writing...
. It was established in 1919 by Alice Warrender, a contemporary patron of the letters, and named after
William Drummond of HawthorndenWilliam Drummond , called "of Hawthornden" was a Scottish poet.-Life:Drummond was born at Hawthornden Castle, Midlothian. His father, John Drummond, was the first laird of Hawthornden; and his mother was Susannah Fowler, sister of William Fowler, poet and courtier...
. Along with the James Tait Black Award, which was established the same year, the Hawthornden is one of the UK's oldest literary prizes. It has been given annually since 1919, with a few gaps.
There is no set category of literature: the specification is for the "best work of imaginative literature".
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The
Hawthornden Prize is a
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
literary awardA literary award is an award presented to an author who has written a particularly lauded piece or body of work. There are awards for forms of writing ranging from poetry to novels. Many awards are also dedicated to a certain genre of fiction or non-fiction writing...
. It was established in 1919 by Alice Warrender, a contemporary patron of the letters, and named after
William Drummond of HawthorndenWilliam Drummond , called "of Hawthornden" was a Scottish poet.-Life:Drummond was born at Hawthornden Castle, Midlothian. His father, John Drummond, was the first laird of Hawthornden; and his mother was Susannah Fowler, sister of William Fowler, poet and courtier...
. Along with the James Tait Black Award, which was established the same year, the Hawthornden is one of the UK's oldest literary prizes. It has been given annually since 1919, with a few gaps.
There is no set category of literature: the specification is for the "best work of imaginative literature". There is no implied restriction to
fictionFiction is a branch of literature which deals, in part or in whole, with temporally contrafactual events...
and
poetryPoetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
. Those, with
dramaDrama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective...
, but also
biographyA biography is a description or account of someone's life and the times, which is usually published in the form of a book or essay, or in some other form, such as a film. An autobiography is a biography of a person's life written or told by that same person...
,
travel writingTravel writing is a style of writing that describes a place, usually using humorous and opinionated views, personal to the writer, or serious and greatly descriptive prose....
and other types of
non-fictionNonfiction is an account or representation of a subject which is presented as fact. This presentation may be accurate or not; that is, it can give either a true or a false account of the subject in question. However, it is generally assumed that the authors of such accounts believe them to be...
, have been recognised over the years. The current value of the prize is £10,000; young writers are especially encouraged.
The awards made in the early 1920s were criticised in some quarters as being motivated by coterie literary politics around
J. C. SquireSir John Squire was a British poet, writer, historian, and influential literary editor of the post-World War I period.- Biography :...
. After the 1925 award to
Sean O'CaseySeán O'Casey was a major Irish dramatist and memoirist...
, there was a gradual shift in emphasis. The list of past winners has little in the way of evident common factors, other than a preference in general for the middle of the road.
List of Winners
- 1919 - Edward Shanks
Edward Richard Buxton Shanks was an English writer, known as a war poet of World War I, then as an academic and journalist, and literary critic and biographer. He also wrote some science fiction....
, The Queen of China
- 1920 - John Freeman
John Frederick Freeman, , was an English poet and essayist, who gave up a successful career in insurance to write full time.He was born in London, and started as an office boy aged 13...
, Poems New and Old
- 1921 - Romer Wilson, The Death of Society
- 1922 - Edmund Blunden
Edmund Charles Blunden, MC was an English poet, author and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong...
, The Shepherd
- 1923 - David Garnett
David Garnett was a British writer and publisher. As a child, he had a cloak made of rabbit skin and thus received the nickname "Bunny", by which he was known to friends and intimates all his life.-Life:...
, Lady into FoxLady into Fox was David Garnett's first novel under his own name, published in 1922. This short and enigmatic work won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Hawthornden Prize a year later.-Plot summary:...
- 1924 - Ralph Hale Mottram, The Spanish Farm
- 1925 - Sean O'Casey
Seán O'Casey was a major Irish dramatist and memoirist...
, Juno and the PaycockJuno and the Paycock is a play by Sean O'Casey, the second of his well-known "Dublin Trilogy" and one of the most highly regarded and oft-performed plays in Ireland. It was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1924...
- 1926 - Vita Sackville-West
Victoria Mary Sackville-West, The Hon Lady Nicolson, CH , best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and poet. Her long narrative poem, The Land, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. She won it again, becoming the only writer to do so, in 1933 with her Collected Poems...
, The Land
- 1927 - Henry Williamson
Henry William Williamson was a prolific English author known for his natural and social history novels.-Biography:Henry Williamson was born in Brockley, southeast London, and attended Colfe's School...
, Tarka the OtterTarka the Otter: His Joyful Water-Life and Death in the Country of the Two Rivers is a novel by Henry Williamson. The book narrates the experience of an otter. It was first published in 1927 by G.P. Putnam's Sons, with an introduction by the Hon. Sir John Fortescue, K.C.V.O..-Plot summary:The plot...
- 1928 - Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC was an English poet and author. He became known as a writer of satirical anti-war verse during World War I...
, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting ManMemoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is a novel by Siegfried Sassoon, first published in 1928. It won both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, being immediately recognised as a classic of English literature...
- 1929 - Lord David Cecil
Lord Edward Christian David Gascoyne-Cecil, usually known as Lord David Cecil, CH , was an English aristocrat, literary scholar, biographer and academic...
, The Stricken Deer: or The Life of CowperWilliam Cowper was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic poetry...
- 1930 - Geoffrey Dennis, The End of the World
- 1931 - Kate O'Brien
Kate O'Brien , was an Irish novelist and playwright. After the success of her play, Distinguished Villa in 1926, she took to full-time writing and was awarded the 1931 James Tait Black Prize for her novel Without My Cloak...
, Without My Cloak
- 1932 - Charles Morgan
Charles Langbridge Morgan , was an English-born playwright and novelist of English and Welsh parentage....
, The Fountain
- 1933 - Vita Sackville-West
Victoria Mary Sackville-West, The Hon Lady Nicolson, CH , best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and poet. Her long narrative poem, The Land, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. She won it again, becoming the only writer to do so, in 1933 with her Collected Poems...
, Collected Poems
- 1934 - James Hilton
James Hilton was an Oscar-winning English novelist, and author of several best-sellers including Lost Horizon and Goodbye Mr. Chips.-Biography:...
, Lost Horizon
- 1935 - Robert Graves
Graves considered himself a poet first and foremost. His poems, together with his translations and innovative interpretations of the Greek Myths, his memoir of the First World war, Good-bye to All That, and his historical study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess, have never been out of...
, I, ClaudiusI, Claudius is a novel by English writer Robert Graves, first published in 1934, that deals sympathetically with the life of the Roman Emperor Claudius and cynically with the history of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty and Roman Empire, from Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BC to Caligula's...
- 1936 - Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was an English writer, best known for such darkly humorous and satirical novels as Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, A Handful of Dust, and The Loved One, as well as for serious works, such as Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy that clearly...
, Saint Edmund CampionSaint Edmund Campion, S.J. was an English Jesuit priest and martyr.-Early years and education :...
: Priest and Martyr
- 1937 - Ruth Pitter
Emma Thomas "Ruth" Pitter, CBE, FRSL was a 20th century British poet.She was the first woman to receive the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1955, and was appointed a CBE in 1979 to honour her many contributions to English literature.In 1974, she was named a "Companion of Literature", the highest...
, A Trophy of Arms
- 1938 - David Jones
David Jones CH was both an artist and one of the most important first generation British modernist poets. His work was formed by his Welsh heritage and his Catholicism. T. S. Eliot considered Jones to be a writer of major importance and his The Anathemata was considered by W. H...
, In Parenthesis
- 1939 - Christopher Hassall
Christopher Vernon Hassall was an English actor, dramatist, librettist, lyricist and poet, who found his greatest fame in a memorable musical partnership with the actor and composer Ivor Novello after working together in the same touring company...
, Penthesperon
- 1940 - James Pope-Hennessy
James Pope Hennessy CVO was a British biographer and travel writer.-Life:Richard James Arthur Pope-Hennessy was born in London on 20 November 1916, the younger son of Ladislaus Herbert Richard Pope-Hennessy, a soldier from County Cork in Ireland, and his wife, Una Constance Pope-Hennessy who was...
, London Fabric
- 1941 - Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...
, The Power and the GloryThe Power and the Glory is a novel by British author Graham Greene. The title is an allusion to the doxology often added to the end of the Lord's Prayer: "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, now and forever , amen." This novel has also been published under the name The...
- 1942 - John Llewellyn Rhys, England is My Village
- 1943 - Sidney Keyes
Sidney Arthur Kilworth Keyes was an English poet of World War II.-Life and Work:...
, The Cruel Solstice and The Iron Laurel
- 1944 - Martyn Skinner, Letters to Malaya
- 1945-1957 - No award
- 1958 - Dom Moraes
Dominic Francis Moraes , popularly known as Dom Moraes was a Goan writer, poet and columnist. He published nearly 30 books.-Early life:...
, A Beginning
- 1959 - No award
- 1960 - Alan Sillitoe
Alan Sillitoe is an English writer, one of the "Angry Young Men" of the 1950s .- Biography :...
, The Loneliness of the Long Distance RunnerThe Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner , by Alan Sillitoe was cinematically adapted as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner , about Colin, a poor Nottingham teenager from a dismal home, with few prospects in life, and few interests beyond petty crime...
- 1961 - Ted Hughes
Edward James Hughes OM was an English poet and children's writer, known as Ted Hughes. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.Hughes was married to the American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 through 1962...
, Lupercal
- 1962 - Robert Shaw
Robert Archibald Shaw was an English stage and film actor and novelist, remembered for his performances in The Sting, From Russia with Love, A Man for All Seasons, the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three , and in particular, Jaws, where he played the working-class fisherman Quint.-Early...
, The Sun DoctorThe Sun Doctor was the second novel written by author and actor Robert Shaw. It was published in 1961, and won the 1962 Hawthornden Prize....
- 1963 - Alistair Horne
Sir Alistair Allan Horne is a British historian of modern France. He is the son of Sir James Horne and Lady Auriol Horne ....
, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916
- 1964 - V. S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul Kt. TC , commonly known as V. S. Naipaul, is a British novelist and essayist of Indo-Trinidadian descent. He is widely considered to be one of the masters of modern English prose...
, Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion
- 1965 - William Trevor
William Trevor, KBE is an Irish author and playwright.Trevor has resided in England since the 1950s. Over the course of his long career he has written several novels and hundreds of short stories. He is best-known for his short stories....
, The Old Boys
- 1966 - No award
- 1967 - Michael Frayn
Michael J. Frayn is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy...
, The Russian Interpreter
- 1968 - Michael Levey
Sir Michael Vincent Levey, LVO was a British art historian and was director of the National Gallery, London for thirteen years, from 1973 to 1986.-Biography:...
, Early Renaissance
- 1969 - Geoffrey Hill
For the British aeronautical engineer and professor, see Geoffrey T. R. HillGeoffrey Hill is an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University.-Biography:Geoffrey Hill was born in Bromsgrove,...
, King Log
- 1970 - Piers Paul Read
Piers Paul Read FRSL is a British novelist and non-fiction writer and author.-Background:Read was born in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. He is the son of the poet and art critic Sir Herbert Read....
, Monk Dawson
- 1971-73 - No award
- 1974 - Oliver Sacks
Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE, FRCP , is a British neurologist residing in New York City. Sacks is the author of several bestselling books, including several collections of case studies of people with neurological disorders...
, AwakeningsAwakenings is a non-fiction book by Oliver Sacks. It chronicles his efforts in the late 1960s to help patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, New York who had been victims of the 1920s encephalitis lethargica epidemic...
- 1975 - David Lodge
David John Lodge CBE, is a British author. Lodge often satirises academia in general and the humanities in particular in his novels...
, Changing PlacesChanging Places is the first "campus novel" by British novelist David Lodge. The subtitle is "A Tale of Two Campuses", and thus both the title and subtitle are literary puns on Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. A successful sequel, Small World, was published in 1984.-Synopsis:Changing Places...
- 1976 - Robert Nye
Robert Nye is an English poet who has also written novels as well as stories for children.Robert Nye was born in London, England, on March 15, 1939. His father was a civil servant, his mother a farmer's daughter. He attended Southend High School and had published poems in the London Magazine by...
, Falstaff
- 1977 - Bruce Chatwin
Bruce Charles Chatwin was an English novelist and travel writer.-Early life:Chatwin was born in 1940 at his maternal grandparents' house in Dronfield, near Sheffield, England...
, In PatagoniaIn Patagonia is an English travel book by Bruce Chatwin, published in 1977. Its ingenuity has become a source of inspiration for travel writers.-Preparations:...
- 1978 - David Cook
David Cook may refer to:*David Cook , winner of the seventh season of American Idol**David Cook , the second solo album by David Cook*David J. Cook , lawman of the American Old West, credited with 3,000 arrests...
, Walter
- 1979 - P. S. Rushforth
Peter Scott Rushforth was an English teacher and novelist. He published only two novels in his lifetime; although they were separated by a quarter of a century, both were released to considerable critical acclaim...
, Kindergarten
- 1980 - Christopher Reid
Christopher Reid is a British poet, essayist, cartoonist, and writer. He has been nominated twice for the Whitbread Awards in 1996 and in 1997. A contemporary of Martin Amis, he was educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He is one of the exponents of Martian poetry which employs unusual metaphors to...
, Arcadia
- 1981 - Douglas Dunn
Douglas Eaglesham Dunn, OBE is a Scottish poet, academic, and critic. He currently lives in Scotland.Dunn was born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire. He was educated at the Scottish School of Librarianship, and worked as a librarian before he started his studies in Hull...
, St. Kilda's Parliament
- 1982 - Timothy Mo
Timothy Peter Mo is an Anglo-Chinese novelist. Born to a Welsh-Yorkshire mother and a Hong Kong Chinese father, Mo lived in Hong Kong until the age of 10 before he moved to Britain, studying at St John's College, Oxford.He self-publishes his books under the label "Paddleless Press".- Novels :*The...
, Sour Sweet
- 1983 - Jonathan Keates
Jonathan Keates, is an English writer, biographer and novelist. Born in Paris, he was schooled at Bryanston and went on to read for his undergraduate degree at Magdalen College, Oxford...
, Allegro Postillions
- 1984-87 - No award
- 1988 - Colin Thubron
Colin Gerald Dryden Thubron, CBE is a British travel writer and novelist. He was born in London on June 14, 1939 and educated at Eton College. Before becoming a writer, he worked for a short time in publishing and film-making...
, Behind the Wall: A Journey through China
- 1989 - Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett is an English author, actor, humorist and playwright.-Early years:Bennett was born in Armley in Leeds, West Yorkshire. The son of a co-op butcher, Bennett attended Leeds Modern School , learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists during his National Service, and gained...
, Talking HeadsTalking Heads is a series of dramatic monologues written for BBC television by the acclaimed British playwright Alan Bennett. The two series were first broadcast in 1988 and 1998, respectively. The pieces have since been broadcast on BBC Radio, performed in live theatre, and included on the A-level...
- 1990 - Kit Wright
Kit Wright is the author of more than twenty-five books, for both adults and children, and the winner of awards including an Arts Council Writers' Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award and the Heinemann Award...
, Short Afternoons
- 1991 - Claire Tomalin
Claire Tomalin is an English biographer and journalist. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge.She was literary editor of the New Statesman and of the Sunday Times, and has written several noted biographies...
, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles DickensCharles John Huffam Dickens FRSA , pen-name "Boz", was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era and one of the most popular of all time. He created some of literature's most memorable characters. His novels and short stories have never gone out of print...
- 1992 - Ferdinand Mount
Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount, 3rd Baronet , known simply as Ferdinand Mount, is a British writer and novelist, columnist for The Sunday Times and commentator on politics, and Conservative Party politician...
, Of Love and Asthma
- 1993 - Andrew Barrow, The Tap Dancer
- 1994 - Tim Pears
Tim Pears is an English novelist. His novels explore social issues as they are processed through the dynamics of family relationships.- Biography :Although born in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, Tim Pears grew up in mid-Devon...
, In the Place of Fallen Leaves
- 1995 - James Michie, The Collected Poems
- 1996 - Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mary Mantel CBE is an English novelist, short story writer and critic. Her work, ranging in subject from personal memoir to historical fiction, has been short-listed for major literary awards...
, An Experiment in Love
- 1997 - John Lanchester
John Henry Lanchester is a British journalist and novelist. He was born in Hamburg, brought up in the Far East and educated in England, at Gresham's School, Holt between 1972 and 1980 and St John's College, Oxford...
, The Debt to Pleasure
- 1998 - Charles Nicholl
Charles Nicholl is an award-winning English author specializing in works of history, biography, literary detection, and travel. His subjects have included Christopher Marlowe, Arthur Rimbaud, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Nashe, and most recently William Shakespeare. Besides his literary output,...
, Somebody Else: Arthur RimbaudJean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet, born in Charleville, Ardennes. As part of the decadent movement, his influence on modern literature, music and art has been enduring and pervasive...
in Africa, 1880-91
- 1999 - Antony Beevor
Antony James Beevor is a British historian, educated at Winchester College and Sandhurst. He studied under the famous historian of World War II, John Keegan. Beevor is a former officer with the 11th Hussars who served in England and Germany for 5 years before resigning his commission...
, StalingradWritten by Antony Beevor, Stalingrad is a narrative history of the epic battle fought in and around the city of Stalingrad during World War II, as well as the events leading up to it and those which occurred after...
- 2000 - Michael Longley
Michael Longley is a Northern Irish poet from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is married to Edna Longley an influential critic on modern Irish and British poetry....
, The Weather in Japan
- 2001 - Helen Simpson
Helen Simpson is an English novelist and short story writer. She was born in 1959 in Bristol, in the West of England, and went to a girls' school. She worked at Vogue for five years before her success in writing short stories meant she could afford to leave and concentrate full-time on her writing...
, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life
- 2002 - Eamon Duffy
Eamon Duffy is an Irish Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and former President of Magdalene College....
, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village
- 2003 - William Fiennes
William Fiennes is a British author, a descendent of the Fiennes family of Broughton Castle near Banbury, Oxfordshire.Fiennes was educated at Eton College and Oxford University; while there, he was diagnosed with Crohn's disease.-Works:...
, The Snow Geese
- 2004 - Jonathan Bate
Jonathan Bate CBE FBA FRSL is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar of Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism....
, John ClareJohn Clare was an English poet, born the son of a farm labourer who came to be known for his representations of the English countryside...
: A Biography
- 2005 - Justin Cartwright
Justin Cartwright is a British novelist.He was born in South Africa, where his father was the editor of the Rand Daily Mail newspaper, and was educated there, in the United States and at Trinity College, Oxford. Cartwright has worked in advertising and has directed documentaries, films and...
, The Promise of Happiness
- 2006 - Alexander Masters
Alexander Masters is an author, screenwriter and worker with the homeless. He lives in Cambridge, United Kingdom.Masters was educated at Bedales School, and took a first in physics from King's College London. He then went St Edmund's College, Cambridge for a further degree in maths, and then the...
, Stuart: A Life BackwardsStuart: A Life Backwards is a book by Alexander Masters, the biography of Stuart Shorter. It explores how a young boy, somewhat disabled from birth, became mentally unstable, criminal and violent, living homeless on the streets of Cambridge...
- 2007 - M. J. Hyland
M. J. Hyland is a novelist. She made her debut in Australia in 2003 with How the Light Gets In. Her second novel Carry Me Down was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and won both the Encore Award and the Hawthornden Prize in 2007...
Carry Me Down
- 2008 - Nicola Barker
Nicola Barker is an English novelist and short story writer.Typically she writes about damaged or eccentric people in mundane situations, and has a fondness for bleak, isolated settings. Wide Open and Behindlings are set respectively on the Isle of Sheppey and Canvey Island...
, Darkmans
See also