Most recent winner:

 

The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin is awarded annually by the University of Iowa on behalf of the estate of Truman Capote. Stipulated in the author’s will and established in 1994 by the Truman Capote Literary Trust, the $30,000 prize is the largest annual cash prize for English-language literary criticism. Winners are nominated and selected each year by a panel of distinguished judges; an awards ceremony is held annually in Iowa City.

Recent Winners

2022
Heather Clark
for Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

 

 

2021
Kay Ryan
for Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose

 

 

2020
Fred Moten
for Black and Blur

 

 

2019
Brent Hayes Edwards
for Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination

 

 

2018
Robert Hass
for A Little Book on Form

 

 

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

 

 

 

Previous Winners

2014
Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism

2013
Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights

2012
Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx

2011
Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

2010
Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter

2009
Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings

2008
Helen Small, The Long Life

2007
William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts

2006
Geoffrey Hartman, The Geoffrey Hartman Reader

2005
Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry

2004
Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses

2003
Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001

2002
Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics

2001
Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars

2000
Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book

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

1999
Charles Rosen, Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen

1998
John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon

1997
John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew

1996
Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition

1995
P.N. Furbank, Diderot