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WH Smith Literary Award

Prize originally for Commonwealth residents, awarded 1959–2005

Summary

Prize originally for Commonwealth residents, awarded 1959–2005

The WH Smith Literary Award was an award founded in 1959 by British high street retailer WH Smith to "encourage and bring international esteem to authors of the British Commonwealth". Originally open to all residents of the UK, the Commonwealth and Ireland, it later admitted foreign works in translation and works by US authors. The final three winners were Americans (Philip Roth, Donna Tartt and Richard Powers), and 2005 was the award's final year.

The WH Smith Illustration Award ran from 1987 to 1994.

The WH Smith Mind-Boggling Book Award for children's literature ran from 1993 to 1996.

WH Smith sponsors the National Book Awards Children's Book of the Year (the "British Children's Book Award" through 2009).

Winners

Year	Author	Title	1959	1960	1961	1962	1963	1964	1965	1966	1967	1968	1969	1970	1971	1972	1973	1974	1975	1976	1977	1978	1979	1980	1981	1982	1983	1984	1985	1986	1987	1988	1989	1990	1991	1992	1993	1994	1995	1996	1997	1998	1999	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005
Patrick White	Voss
Laurie Lee	Cider With Rosie
Nadine Gordimer	Friday's Footprint
J. R. Ackerley	We Think the World of You
Gabriel Fielding	The Birthday King
Ernst Gombrich	Meditations on a Hobby-Horse
Leonard Woolf	Beginning Again
R. C. Hutchinson	A Child Possessed
Jean Rhys	Wide Sargasso Sea
V. S. Naipaul	The Mimic Men
Robert Gittings	John Keats
John Fowles	The French Lieutenant's Woman
Nan Fairbrother	New Lives, New Landscapes
Kathleen Raine	The Lost Country
Brian Moore	Catholics
Anthony Powell	Temporary Kings
Jon Stallworthy	Wilfred Owen
Seamus Heaney	North
Ronald Lewin	Slim: The Standardbearer
Patrick Leigh Fermor	A Time of Gifts
Mark Girouard	Life in the English Country House
Thom Gunn	Selected Poems 1950–1975
Isabel Colegate	The Shooting Party
George Clare	Last Waltz in Vienna
A. N. Wilson	Wise Virgin
Philip Larkin	Required Writing
David Hughes	The Pork Butcher
Doris Lessing	The Good Terrorist
Elizabeth Jennings	Collected Poems 1953–1985
Robert Hughes	The Fatal Shore
Christopher Hill	A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church
V. S. Pritchett	A Careless Widow and Other Stories
Derek Walcott	Omeros
Thomas Pakenham	The Scramble for Africa
Michèle Roberts	Daughters of the House
Vikram Seth	A Suitable Boy
Alice Munro	Open Secrets
Simon Schama	Landscape and Memory
Orlando Figes	A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924
Ted Hughes	Tales from Ovid
Beryl Bainbridge	Master Georgie
Melvyn Bragg	The Soldier's Return
Philip Roth	The Human Stain
Ian McEwan	Atonement
Donna Tartt	The Little Friend
Richard Powers	The Time of Our Singing
Philip Roth	The Plot Against America

WH Smith Mind-Boggling Book Award

For a few years, W H Smith also offered a children's book award. The judges were children between nine and twelve, and the intention was to promote books which were "accessible to children in content and price, as well as offering a gripping read."

The winners were:

1993: Philip Ridley, Krindlekrax
1994: Malorie Blackman, Hacker
1995: Maggie Prince, Memoirs of a Dangerous Alien
1996: Sharon Creech, Walk Two Moons

References

[http://www.librarything.com/bookaward/WH%20Smith%20Literary%20Award WH Smith Literary Award at aLibraryThing]
"Mind-Boggling Book Award".

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

commonwealth-literary-awards awards-established-in-1959 1959-establishments-in-the-united-kingdom awards-disestablished-in-2005 2005-disestablishments-in-the-united-kingdom british-fiction-awards

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