Previous Winners

2017 - Gillian Beer

for Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll

2016 - Kevin Birmingham

for The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses

2015 - Stanley Plumly

for The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner With Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb

2014 - Fredric Jameson

for The Antinomies of Realism

2013 - Marina Warner

for Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights

2012 - Elaine Showalter

for A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx

2011 - Mark McGurl

for The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

2010 - Seth Lerer

for Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter

2009 - Geoffrey Hill

for Collected Critical Writings

2008 - Helen Small

for The Long Life

2007 - William H. Gass

for A Temple of Texts

2006 - Geoffrey Hartman

for The Geoffrey Hartman Reader

2005 - Angus Fletcher

for A New Theory for American Poetry

2004 - Susan Stewart

for Poetry and the Fate of the Senses

2003 - Seamus Heaney

for Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001

2002 - Declan Kiberd

for Irish Classics

2001 - Malcolm Bowie

for Proust Among the Stars

2000 - Elaine Scarry & Philip Fisher

for Dreaming by the Book

Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction

for 1999 - Charles Rosen

Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen

1998 - John Kerrigan

for Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon

1997 - John Felstiner

for Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew

1996 - Helen Vendler

for The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition

1995 - P.N. Furbank

for Diderot