College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin
for Sentient Flesh
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
2023R.A. Judy
for Sentient Flesh
2022Heather Clark
for Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
2021Kay Ryan
for Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose
2020Fred Moten
for Black and Blur
2019Brent Hayes Edwards
for Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination
2018Robert Hass
for A Little Book on Form
2017Gillian Beer
for Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll
2016Kevin Birmingham
for The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses
2015Stanley 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