Andrea Brady, poet and Professor of Poetry at Queen Mary University of London, has been selected as the 2025 recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin.
The $30,000 prize is the largest annual cash prize for English-language literary criticism and is administered by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on behalf of the estate of Truman Capote.
An awards ceremony will take place at 4pm on Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025, in the Old Capitol Senate Chamber. The event will feature remarks by Brady and a reception in the Old Capitol Rotunda. The ceremony and reception are open to the public.
Brady will be honored for her second book of criticism, a wide-ranging survey of lyric poetry, titled Poetry and Bondage: A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint, published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press. Spanning the poetic tradition from ancient Rome to contemporary America, the book examines the ways that lyric poetry, often oriented toward formal constraint, has tended to obscure the material constraints of the enslaved and imprisoned people of those historical moments. Brady’s work also looks at examples of contemporary poets who have approached the lyric form in new ways.
The selection committee recognized the unique power of Brady’s work:
“Poetry and Bondage is an extraordinary book in its ambition, its generic hybridity, its historical range and its mastery of interdisciplinary fields. Focusing on poetics, it is this book’s distinction that it is both motivated by aesthetic response and deeply skeptical of it. In these pages, Brady interrogates closely the historical, social, political and psychological determinants of aesthetic response and seeks to unite response with responsibility in a way that inflects that response with political force.”
Brady’s research interests include early modern literature, contemporary avant-garde poetries, African-American poetry and poetics, and poetry and politics. In addition to her critical work, Brady has published eight books of poetry. Her creative work has been translated into nine languages. She earned her BA at Columbia University and her PhD at Cambridge University.
“I am honoured to receive the Truman Capote Award, which recognises the value of literary criticism at a time when the humanities are under intense pressure,” Brady says. “My book argues that poetry is not a marginal form, but a vital means through which people—especially those in bondage—have explored freedom, constraint, pleasure and pain. The stories we tell about literature become richer when we include voices excluded from its history. I am deeply grateful to the judges for supporting this inclusive vision of our discipline.”
Over the past three decades, the Capote Trust has provided the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with $4.3 million to fund the prize, fellowships, and scholarships. Nationally, the trust has granted universities a combined $12.5 million to support creative writing students.
To learn more about the award and previous recipients, visit the Iowa Writers’ Workshop website.
