Somerset Maugham Award
Annual British literary award
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Somerset Maugham Award is a British literary prize given each year by the Society of Authors. Set up by William Somerset Maugham in 1947 the awards enable young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience in foreign countries. The awards go to writers under the age of 35[1] with works published in the year before the award; the work can be either non-fiction, fiction or poetry.[2]
Since 1964 multiple winners have usually been chosen in the same year. In 1975 and in 2012 the award was not given.[3]
List of winners
1940s
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1947 | A. L. Barker | Innocents | Hogarth Press |
| 1948 | P. H. Newby | Journey to the Interior | Jonathan Cape |
| 1949 | Hamish Henderson | Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica | John Lehmann |
1950s
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1950 | Nigel Kneale | Tomato Cain & Other Stories | Collins | |
| 1951 | Roland Camberton | Scamp | John Lehmann | |
| 1952 | Francis King | The Dividing Stream | Longman | |
| 1953 | Emyr Humphreys | Hear and Forgive | Gollancz | |
| 1954 | Doris Lessing | Five Short Novels | Michael Joseph | |
| 1955 | Kingsley Amis | Lucky Jim | Gollancz | |
| 1956 | Elizabeth Jennings | A Way of Looking | Deutsch | |
| 1957 | George Lamming | In the Castle of My Skin | Michael Joseph | [5][6] |
| 1958 | John Wain | Preliminary Essays | Macmillan | |
| 1959 | Thom Gunn | A Sense of Movement | Faber and Faber |
1960s
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | Ted Hughes | The Hawk in the Rain | Faber and Faber | |
| 1961 | V. S. Naipaul | Miguel Street | Deutsch | |
| 1962 | Hugh Thomas | The Spanish Civil War | Eyre & Spottiswoode | |
| 1963 | David Storey | Flight Into Camden | Longman | |
| 1964 | Dan Jacobson | Time of Arrival | Weidenfeld | |
| John Le Carré | The Spy Who Came in from the Cold | Gollancz | ||
| 1965 | Peter Everett | Negatives | Jonathan Cape | |
| 1966 | Michael Frayn | The Tin Men | Collins | |
| 1966 | Julian Mitchell | The White Father | Constable | |
| 1967 | B.S. Johnson | Trawl | Secker & Warburg | |
| Andrew Sinclair | The Better Half | Jonathan Cape | ||
| 1968 | Paul Bailey | At The Jerusalem | Jonathan Cape | [7][8] |
| Seamus Heaney | Death of a Naturalist | Faber and Faber | ||
| 1969 | Angela Carter | Several Perceptions | Heinemann |
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher | Prize | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Ben Wilson | What Price Liberty? | Faber and Faber | £2,000 | [62] |
| Helen Oyeyemi | White is for Witching | Picador | £3,000 | [63][64] | |
| Jacob Polley | Talk of the Town | Picador | £5,000 | [65] | |
| 2011 | Miriam Gamble | The Squirrels Are Dead | Bloodaxe | £3,500 | |
| Alexandra Harris | Romantic Moderns | Thames and Hudson | £3,500 | ||
| Adam O'Riordan | In the Flesh | Chatto Poetry | £3,500 | [66] | |
| 2012 | No award given | [12] | |||
| 2013 | Ned Beauman | The Teleportation Accident | Sceptre | £2,500 | [67] |
| Abi Curtis | The Glass Delusion | Salt | £2,500 | ||
| Joe Stretch | The Adult | Cape | £2,500 | ||
| Lucy Wood | Diving Belles | Bloomsbury | £2,500 | ||
| 2014 | Amy Sackville | Orkney | Granta | £2,000 | |
| Daisy Hildyard | Hunters in the Snow Glass Delusion | Cape | £4,000 | ||
| Nadifa Mohamed | The Orchard of Lost Souls | Simon & Schuster | £4,000 | [68] | |
| 2015 | Jonathan Beckman | How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette, the Stolen Diamonds and the Scandal that Shook the French Throne | John Murray | £2,500 | [69] |
| Liz Berry | Black Country | Chatto & Windus | £2,500 | [69] | |
| Ben Brooks | Lolito | Canongate Books | £2,500 | [69] | |
| Zoe Pilger | Eat My Heart Out | Serpent’s Tail | £2,500 | [69] | |
| 2016 | Jessie Greengrass | An Account Of The Decline Of The Great Auk, According To One Who Saw It | JM Originals | £2,500 | |
| Daisy Hay | Mr & Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance | Chatto & Windus | £2,500 | ||
| Andrew McMillan | Physical | Cape Poetry | £2,500 | [70][71][72] | |
| Thomas Morris | We Don’t Know What We’re Doing | Faber and Faber | £2,500 | ||
| Jack Underwood | Happiness | Faber and Faber | £2,500 | ||
| 2017 | Edmund Gordon | The Invention of Angela Carter | Vintage | £5,000 | [73] |
| Melissa Lee-Houghton | Sunshine | Penned in the Margins | £5,000 | [73] | |
| Martin MacInnes | Infinite Ground | Atlantic Books | £5,000 | ||
| 2018 | Kayo Chingonyi | Kumukanda | Chatto Poetry | £5,250 | [74] |
| Fiona Mozley | Elmet | JM Originals | £5,250 | ||
| Miriam Nash | All the Prayers in the House | Bloodaxe | £5,250 | ||
| 2019 | Raymond Antrobus | The Perseverance | Penned in the Margins | £4,000 | [75][76] |
| Damian Le Bas | The Stopping Places | Chatto & Windus | £4,000 | ||
| Phoebe Power | Shrines of Upper Austria | Carcanet | £4,000 | ||
| Nell Stevens | Mrs Gaskell and Me | Picador | £4,000 | ||
2020s
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Oliver Soden | Michael Tippett: The Biography | Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Orion | |
| Roseanne Watt | Moder Dy | Birlinn/Polygon | ||
| Alex Allison | The Art of the Body | Dialogue Books/Little, Brown & Co. | ||
| Amrou Al-Kadhi | Unicorn | 4th Estate | ||
| 2021 | Lamorna Ash | Dark, Salt, Clear | Bloomsbury | |
| Isabelle Baafi | Ripe | Ignition Press | ||
| Akeem Balogun | The Storm | Okapi Books | ||
| Graeme Armstrong | The Young Team | Pan Macmillan/Picador | [77] | |
| 2022 | Stephanie Sy-Quia | Amnion | Granta, Granta Poetry | [78] |
| Tice Cin | Keeping the House | And Other Stories | [78][79] | |
| Lucia Osborne-Crowley | My Body Keeps Your Secrets | Indigo Press | [78] | |
| Caleb Azumah Nelson | Open Water | Penguin Random House/Viking Press | [78] | |
| Maia Elsner | Overrun by Wild Boars | Flipped Eye Publishing | [78] | |
| 2023 | Travis Alabanza | None of the Above | Canongate | [80] |
| Sussie Anie | To Fill a Yellow House | Phoenix Books | [80] | |
| Mya-Rose Craig | Birdgirl | Penguin | [80] | |
| Jay Gao | Imperium | Carcanet | [80] | |
| Gurnaik Johal | We Move | Profile | [80] | |
| Moses McKenzie | An Olive Grove in Ends | Wildfire | [80] | |
| 2024 | Iona Lee | Anamesis | [81] | |
| Momtaza Mehri | Bad Diaspora Poems | [81] | ||
| Katherine Pangonis | Twilight Cities | [81] | ||
| Cecile Pin | Wandering Souls | [81] | ||
| Phoenicia Rogerson | Herc | HarperCollins/HQ Stories | [81] | |
| 2025 | Jo Hamya | The Hypocrite | [82] | |
| Ashani Lewis | Winter Animals | |||
| Jason Okundaye | Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain | |||
| Charlotte Shevchenko Night | Food for the Dead | |||