The Names of Awards

This newsletter goes out to you while I am on a literary tour in Sicily. The other day, my group visited the fabulous museum for Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and I was interested that there is a literary award in his name. It is to honour works promoting peace and coexistence, and it has been won by Kazuo Ishiguro, Anita Desai, Carlo Ginzburg, amongst others.

This made me wonder about other prestigious literary awards given in the name of a writer. In Australia, of course, we have the Miles Franklin Award, honouring novels of great merit that present Australian life. And there’s the Patrick White Award. He used the money he received from the Nobel Prize in Literature to establish an award for a writer who has been creative for a long time without receiving adequate recognition. White stipulated that the prize was to be announced soon after Melbourne Cup Day, so as to turn the nation’s attention from sport to literature – quite rightly, in my view!

America has the Edgar Awards for mysteries and the PEN/Faulkner Award for works of fiction penned by American citizens. There is also the ‘WILLA’, named for Willa Cather and given to honour literature featuring women’s stories set in the North American West (which is pretty specific), the John Newbery Medal for American writings for children, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction. The Wilder Award, for excellent works for children, is named for Laura Ingalls Wilder (author of Little House on the Prairie), and there’s the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize for a mid-career author. And the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize was named for Joseph Pulitzer, a journalist who reshaped newspaper journalism in the USA.

The Hans Christian Andersen Award is the world’s most prestigious prize for children’s literature, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award is the richest prize in children’s literature. The Cervantes Prize was named for Miguel de Cervantes, who, of course, wrote Don Quixote – it is for works written in Spanish. The Dutch have the Constantijn Huygens Award (he was a 17th century Dutch poet – must admit I’ve never heard of him before), the Czech Republic has the Franz Kafka Prize, and the French have the Prix Goncourt for prose writing, established in the name of the Goncourt brothers, who were authors and publishers. Portugal has the José Saramago Prize, Norway offers the International Ibsen Award for theatrical writings, Poland has the Silesius Poetry Award named for 17th century poet Angelus Silesius, while Germany has the Georg Bűchner Prize and the triennial Goethe Prize.

In Britain, there’s the Agatha Award for works of traditional mystery and crime fiction. The Somerset Maugham Award is for young British authors; the Bram Stoker Award is given out for works of horror. There’s the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and you have to be under 39 to win that one. Sir Walter Scott was the first author of historical novels, so it is appropriate that the award for a novel set in the past should bear his name.

In South America, there is the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for female writers in Spanish (Sor Juana was a 17th century Mexican nun who wrote some hilarious plays, amongst other works), and there is the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for works of Latin American literature. The Carlos Fuentes International Prize was established by the Mexican government,

There are sure to be many such awards in Asia, Africa and other parts of the world. If I had loads of money, I would establish a generous literary prize for scholars writing about Jane Austen, but don’t hold your breath waiting for that one.