:Literary Awards:
The Georgia Center for the Book is the co-sponsor of the major literary awards presented in the state of Georgia.
The Townsend Prize
The Townsend Prize for fiction is awarded every other year to the Georgia writer judged to have produced the best work of fiction or short stories in the previous two years. It was created in 1981 in honor of the founding editor of Atlanta magazine, Jim Townsend.
The award was administered by Georgia state university from 1981-1997 and by Georgia Perimeter college with the Chattahoochee Review from 1997-2008. Currently the award is administered by the Writers Institute at Georgia Perimeter College with the Chattahoochee Review and the Center for the Book. Co-sponsors include the Atlanta Writers Club and the Margaret Mitchell house Museum of the Atlanta History Center.
The 2010 winner is Kathryn Stockett for her first novel The Help published in 2009. The novel tells a story of black and white women in 1960s Mississippi, “a page-turner that brings resonance to the moral issues it raises,” according to The Washington Post. The novel has received widespread critical acclaim throughout the country and has been a national bestseller for over a year.
Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, and was graduated from the university of Alabama. She worked in marketing and magazine published for several years in New York City before moving to Atlanta, where she now makes her home. She is at work on a second novel.
The final nominated books for the 2010 Townsend Award include:
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Snakeskin Road
James Braziel -
The King James Conspiracy
Philip Depoy -
Blue Jesus
Tom Edwards -
The Confederate General Rides North
Amanda Gable -
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
Joshilyn Jackson -
Wait Until Midnight
Sang Pak -
The Help
Kathryn Stockett -
Nothing with Strings
Bailey White -
Bound South
Susan Rebecca White -
The Campfire Boys
Philip Lee Willliams
Previous winners of the Townsend Prize are:
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A Cabinet of Wonders (2008)
Renee Dodd -
Sabbath Creek (2006)
Judson Mitcham -
The Valley of Light (2004)
Terry Kay -
The Bridegroom: Stories (2002)
Ha Jin -
Daughter of My People (2000)
James Kilgo -
The Sweet Everlasting (1998)
Judson Mitcham -
Some Personal Papers (1996)
JoAllen Bradham -
The Laughing Place (1994)
Pam Durban -
When All the World Was Young (1991)
Ferrol Sams -
The Lives of the Dead (1990)
Charlie Smith -
Alice (1989)
Sara Flanigan -
And Venus is Blue (1986)
Mary Hood -
The Heart of a Distant Forest (1986)
Philip Lee Williams -
The Color Purple (1984)
Alice Walker -
Children, My Children (1982)
Celestine Sibley
The Lindberg Award
The Stanley W. Lindberg Award was presented biennially from 1999-2007 and co-sponsored by the Center for the Book. It was named for Stanley W. Lindberg, editor of The Georgia Review 1977-2000 and honored a Georgia man or woman who made important contributions to the state’s literary culture through a lifetime of work and accomplishment.
The Lindberg Award winners are:
- 2007: Terry Kay, Hart County native, Georgia Writers Hall of Fame inductee and author of more than a dozen acclaimed works of fiction
- 2005: Tina McElroy Ansa, Macon native, writing teacher and author of novels including Baby of the Family and Ugly Ways
- 2003: Bettie Sellers, spent most of her life near Young Harris, former Poet Laureate of Georgia, author of more than a half dozen volumes of poetry and essays
- 2001: Marion Montgomery, acclaimed writer and critic and long-time faculty member at the University of Georgia
- 1999: Pat Conroy, native of Atlanta, author of bestselling novels including South of Broad, Beach Music and The Prince of Tides
The Lillian Smith Award
The Lillian Smith Award was established by the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Council shortly after the death of the Georgia author in 1966. The award is presented annually to authors whose books are outstanding creative achievements which demonstrate through literary merit and moral vision an honest representation of the South, its people, its problems, and its promises.
In 2004, the Southern Regional council entered into a partnership with the University of Georgia Libraries, which now administers the awards. In 2007, the Georgia Center for the Book joined the partnership as a co-sponsor to help the awards reach a wider audience.
The winners of the 2009 Lillian Smith Award are Arelia J. Gross, author of What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America, published by Harvard University Press; and Bob Zellner with Constance Curry, authors of The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, published by New South Books. They will be honored on Sunday, September 6, 2009 at the fourth annual AJC Decatur Book Festival.
Gross is the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History at the University of Southern California. Her book examines the legal history of racial identity, showing how the relationships of race have affected claims of citizenship over the past 150 years. “This book reminds us that the imaginary connection between racial identity and fitness for citizenship remains potent today and continues to impede racial justice and equality.”
The book by Zellner with Curry is a compelling memoir of how civil rights activist Zellner, a white Alabamian and grandson of Ku Klux Klansmen, joined ranks with black students who were marching, fighting and sometimes dying in the turbulent 1960s to challenge the Southern “way of life” in a Deep south state.
Previous Lillian Smith Book Award Winners:
- 2009: Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America; Bob Zellner with Constance Curry, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek.
- 2008: Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country; Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart.
- 2007: Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority; Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard.
- 2006: W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past; Heather A. Williams, African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.
- 2005: Stephanie H.M. Camp, Closer to Freedom; Frye Gaillard, Cradle of Freedom; Tayari Jones, The Untelling.
- 2004: Barbara Ramsey, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement; Elizabeth Varon, Southern Lady, Yankee Spy; Frank X. Walker, Buffalo Dance.
- 2002: Anthony Grooms, Bombingham; Mark Newman, Getting Right with God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945-1995; William H. Chafee, Raymond Gavins, Robert Korstad (editors), Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South.
- 2001: Hal Crowther, Cathedrals of Kudzu; Pam Durban, So Far Back; Robert P. Moses & Charles E. Cobb, Radical Equations; Natasha Trethewey, Domestic Work.
- 2000: Lawrence N. Powell, Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, The Holocaust and David Duke’s Louisiana; Andrew M. Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out; Michael Keith Honey, Black Workers Remember.
- 1999: J. Morgan Kousser, Colorblind justice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction; Leroy Davis, A Clashing of the Soul.
- 1998: John Lewis, Walking with the Wind; Elizabeth Cox, Night Talk.
- 1997: John M. Barry, The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America; Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain.
- 1996: Michael D’Orso, Like Judgment Day; Constance Curry, Silver Rights; Anthony Grooms, Trouble No More.
- 1995: Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom; Adam Fairclough, Race & Democracy; Mary Lee Settle, Choices.
- 1994: John Gregory Brown, Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery; Henry Louis Gates Jr., Colored People; John Dittmer, Local People: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.
- 1993: Charles W. Eagles, Outside Agitator; William Baldwin, The Hard to Catch Mercy; Margaret Rose Gladney, How Am I to be Heard?
- 1992: Marian Wright Edelman, The Measure of Our Success; Melissa Fay Greene, Praying for Sheetrock; Denise Giardina, The Unquiet Earth.
- 1991: J.L. Chesnut Jr. & Julia Cass, Black in Selma; Mary Ward Brown, Tongues of Flame.
- 1990: Wayne Flynt, Poor But Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites; Dori Sanders: Clover.
- 1989: Melany Nielson, Even Mississippi; Madison Smartt Bell, Soldier’s Joy; Gloria Naylor, Mama Day.
- 1988: Melton A. McLaurin, Separate Pasts; C. Eric Lincoln, The Avenue: Clayton City.
- 1987: Thomas L. Johnson & Phillip C. Dunn, A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920-1936; Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage; Mary Hood, And Venus is Blue.
- 1986: A.J. Mojtabai, Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo.
- 1985: James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart; Peter Taylor, The old Forest and Other Stories.
- 1984: John Egerton, Generation: An American Family; Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens; Eudora Welty, Special Lifetime Award,
- 1983: Fred Hobson, South-Watching: Selected Essays; Roy Hoffman, Almost Family.
- 1982: Harry S. Ashmore, Hearts and Minds: The anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan; John Ehle, The Winter People.
- 1981: John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness; Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline.
- 1980: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry; Cormac McCarthy, Suttree.
- 1979: Marion Wright & Arnold Shankman, Human Rights Odyssey; Ernest J. Gaines, In My Father’s House.
- 1978: Will D. Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly; Garrett Epps, The Shad Treatment.
- 1977: Alex Haley, Roots; Richard Kluger: Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality.
- 1976: James Loewen & Charles Saillis, Mississippi: Conflict and Change; Reynolds Price, The Surface of Earth.
- 1974: C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow; Albert Murray, Train Whistle Guitar.
- 1973: Harold Martin, Ralph McGill, Reporter; Alice Walker, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems.
- 1972: Robert Coles: Children of Crisis, Volume II: Migrant’s, Sharecroppers, and Mountaineers.
- 1971: Anthony Dunbar, Our Land, Too.
- 1970: Paul Gaston, The New South Creed.
- 1969: Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South.
- 1968: George M. Tindall: The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945.