Somerset Maugham Award
The Somerset Maugham Award is a British literary prize given each year by the Society of Authors. Set up by William Somerset Maugham in 1947 the awards enable young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience in foreign countries. The awards go to writers under the age of 30 with works published in the previous year to the award, the work can be either non-fiction, fiction or poetry.
Since 1964, multiple winners have usually been chosen in the same year. In 1975 and in 2012, the award was not given. The award has twice been won by the son of a previous winner: Kingsley Amis was the father of Martin Amis, and Nigel Kneale the father of Matthew Kneale.
List of winners
2020s
2020- Alex Allison for The Art of the Body
- Oliver Soden for Michael Tippett: The Biography
- Roseanne Watt for Moder Dy
- Amrou Al-Kadhi for Unicorn
2010s
- Raymond Antrobus for The Perseverance
- Damian Le Bas for The Stopping Places
- Phoebe Power for Shrines of Upper Austria
- Nell Stevens for Mrs Gaskell and Me
- Kayo Chingonyi for Kumukanda
- Fiona Mozley for Elmet
- Miriam Nash for All the Prayers in the House
- Edmund Gordon for The Invention of Angela Carter
- Melissa Lee-Houghton for Sunshine
- Martin MacInnes for Infinite Ground
- Jessie Greengrass for An Account Of The Decline Of The Great Auk, According To One Who Saw It
- Daisy Hay for Mr & Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance
- Andrew McMillan for Physical
- Thomas Morris for We Don't Know What We're Doing
- Jack Underwood for Happiness
- Jonathan Beckman for How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette, the Stolen Diamonds and the Scandal that Shook the French Throne
- Liz Berry for Black Country
- Ben Brooks for Lolito
- Zoe Pilger for Eat My Heart Out
- Nadifa Mohamed for The Orchard of Lost Souls
- Daisy Hildyard for Hunters in the Snow Grass
- Amy Sackville for Orkney
- Ned Beauman for The Teleportation Accident
- Abi Curtis for The Glass Delusion
- Joe Stretch for The Adult
- Lucy Wood for Diving Belles
- No Award
- Miriam Gamble for The Squirrels Are Dead
- Alexandra Harris for Romantic Moderns
- Adam O’Riordan for In the Flesh
- Jacob Polley for Talk of the Town
- Helen Oyeyemi for White is for Witching
- Ben Wilson for What Price Liberty?
2000s
- Adam Foulds for The Broken Word
- Alice Albinia for Empires of the Indus
- Rodge Glass for Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography
- Henry Hitchings for The Secret Life of Words
- Thomas Leveritt for The Exchange-Rate Between Love and Money
- Helen Walsh for Once Upon a Time in England
- Steven Hall for The Raw Shark Texts
- Nick Laird for On Purpose
- Gwendoline Riley for Joshua Spassky
- Adam Thirlwell for Miss Herbert
- Horatio Clare for Running For The Hills
- James Scudamore for The Amnesia Clinic
- Chris Cleave for Incendiary
- Zadie Smith for On Beauty
- Owen Sheers for Skirrid Hill
- Justin Hill for Passing Under Heaven
- Maggie O'Farrell for The Distance Between Us
- Charlotte Mendelson for Daughters of Jerusalem
- Mark Blayney for Two Kinds of Silence
- Robert Macfarlane for Mountains of the Mind
- William Fiennes for The Snow Geese
- Hari Kunzru for The Impressionist
- Jon McGregor for If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
- Charlotte Hobson for Black Earth City
- Marcel Theroux for '
- Edward Platt for Leadville
- Ben Rice for Pobby and Dingan
- Bella Bathurst for The Lighthouse Stevensons
- Sarah Waters for Affinity
1900s
- Andrea Ashworth for Once in a House on Fire
- Paul Farley for The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You
- Giles Foden for The Last King of Scotland
- Jonathan Freedland for Bring Home the Revolution
- Rachel Cusk for The Country Life
- Jonathan Rendall for This Bloody Mary Is the Last Thing I Own
- Kate Summerscale for The Queen of Whale Cay
- Robert Twigger for Angry White Pyjamas
- Rhidian Brook for The Testimony of Taliesin Jones
- Kate Clanchy for Slattern
- Philip Hensher for Kitchen Venom
- Francis Spufford for I May Be Some Time
- Katherine Pierpoint for Truffle Beds
- Alan Warner for Morvern Callar
- Patrick French for Younghusband
- Simon Garfield for The End of Innocence
- Kathleen Jamie for The Queen of Sheba
- Laura Thompson for The Dogs
- Jackie Kay for Other Lovers
- A. L. Kennedy for Looking For the Possible Dance
- Philip Marsden for Crossing Place
- Dea Birkett for Jella
- Duncan McLean for Bucket of Tongues
- Glyn Maxwell for Out of the Rain
- Geoff Dyer for '
- Lawrence Norfolk for Lemprière's Dictionary
- Gerard Woodward for Householder
- Peter Benson for The Other Occupant
- Lesley Glaister for Honour Thy Father
- Helen Simpson for Four Bare Legs in a Bed
- Mark Hudson for Our Grandmothers' Drums
- Sam North for The Automatic Man
- Nicholas Shakespeare for The Vision of Elena Silves
1980s
- Rupert Christiansen for Romantic Affinities
- Alan Hollinghurst for The Swimming Pool Library
- Deirdre Madden for The Birds of the Innocent Wood
- Jimmy Burns for The Land That Lost Its Heroes
- Carol Ann Duffy for Selling Manhattan
- Matthew Kneale for Whore Banquets
- Stephen Gregory for The Cormorant
- Janni Howker for Isaac Campion
- Andrew Motion for The Lamberts
- Patricia Ferguson for Family Myths and Legends
- Adam Nicolson for Frontiers
- Tim Parks for Tongues of Flame
- Blake Morrison for Dark Glasses
- Jeremy Reed for By the Fisheries
- Jane Rogers for Her Living Image
- Peter Ackroyd for The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
- Timothy Garton Ash for The Polish Revolution: Solidarity
- Sean O'Brien for The Indoor Park
- Lisa St Aubin de Teran for Keepers of the House
- William Boyd for A Good Man in Africa
- Adam Mars-Jones for Lantern Lecture
- Julian Barnes for Metroland
- Clive Sinclair for Hearts of Gold
- A. N. Wilson for The Healing Art
- Max Hastings for Bomber Command
- Christopher Reid for Arcadia
- Humphrey Carpenter for The Inklings
1970s
- Helen Hodgman for Jack & Jill
- Sara Maitland for Daughter of Jerusalem
- Tom Paulin for A State of Justice
- Nigel Williams for My Life Closed Twice
- Richard Holmes for Shelley: The Pursuit
- Dominic Cooper for The Dead of Winter
- Ian McEwan for First Love, Last Rites
- No Award
- Martin Amis for The Rachel Papers
- Peter Prince for Play Things
- Paul Strathern for A Season in Abyssinia
- Jonathan Street for Prudence Dictates
- Douglas Dunn for Terry Street
- Gillian Tindall for Fly Away Home
- Susan Hill for I'm the King of the Castle
- Richard Barber for The Knight and Chivalry
- Michael Hastings for Tussy Is Me
- Jane Gaskell for A Sweet Sweet Summer
- Piers Paul Read for Monk Dawson
1960s
- Angela Carter for Several Perceptions
- Paul Bailey for At The Jerusalem
- Seamus Heaney for Death of a Naturalist
- B. S. Johnson for Trawl
- Andrew Sinclair for The Better Half
- Michael Frayn for The Tin Men
- Julian Mitchell for The White Father
- Peter Everett for Negatives
- Dan Jacobson for Time of Arrival
- John le Carré for The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
- David Storey for Flight Into Camden
- Hugh Thomas for The Spanish Civil War
- V. S. Naipaul for Miguel Street
- Ted Hughes for The Hawk in the Rain''
1950s
- Thom Gunn for A Sense Of Movement
- John Wain for Preliminary Essays
- George Lamming for In the Castle of My Skin
- Elizabeth Jennings for A Way of Looking
- Kingsley Amis for Lucky Jim
- Doris Lessing for Five Short Novels
- Emyr Humphreys for Hear and Forgive
- Francis King for The Dividing Stream
- Roland Camberton for Scamp
- Nigel Kneale for Tomato Cain & Other Stories
1940s
- Hamish Henderson for Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica
- P. H. Newby for Journey to the Interior
- A. L. Barker for Innocents