TheSomerset Maugham Award is aBritish literary prize given each year by theSociety of Authors. Set up byWilliam 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 35[1] with works published in the year before the award; the work can be either non-fiction, fiction or poetry.[2]
Since 1964 multiple winners have usually been chosen in the same year. In 1975 and in 2012 the award was not given.[3]
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1947 | A. L. Barker | Innocents | Hogarth Press |
| 1948 | P. H. Newby | Journey to the Interior | Jonathan Cape |
| 1949 | Hamish Henderson | Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica | John Lehmann |
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1950 | Nigel Kneale | Tomato Cain & Other Stories | Collins | |
| 1951 | Roland Camberton | Scamp | John Lehmann | |
| 1952 | Francis King | The Dividing Stream | Longman | |
| 1953 | Emyr Humphreys | Hear and Forgive | Gollancz | |
| 1954 | Doris Lessing | Five Short Novels | Michael Joseph | |
| 1955 | Kingsley Amis | Lucky Jim | Gollancz | |
| 1956 | Elizabeth Jennings | A Way of Looking | Deutsch | |
| 1957 | George Lamming | In the Castle of My Skin | Michael Joseph | [5][6] |
| 1958 | John Wain | Preliminary Essays | Macmillan | |
| 1959 | Thom Gunn | A Sense of Movement | Faber and Faber |
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | Ted Hughes | The Hawk in the Rain | Faber and Faber | |
| 1961 | V. S. Naipaul | Miguel Street | Deutsch | |
| 1962 | Hugh Thomas | The Spanish Civil War | Eyre & Spottiswoode | |
| 1963 | David Storey | Flight Into Camden | Longman | |
| 1964 | Dan Jacobson | Time of Arrival | Weidenfeld | |
| John Le Carré | The Spy Who Came in from the Cold | Gollancz | ||
| 1965 | Peter Everett | Negatives | Jonathan Cape | |
| 1966 | Michael Frayn | The Tin Men | Collins | |
| 1966 | Julian Mitchell | The White Father | Constable | |
| 1967 | B.S. Johnson | Trawl | Secker & Warburg | |
| Andrew Sinclair | The Better Half | Jonathan Cape | ||
| 1968 | Paul Bailey | At The Jerusalem | Jonathan Cape | [7][8] |
| Seamus Heaney | Death of a Naturalist | Faber and Faber | ||
| 1969 | Angela Carter | Several Perceptions | Heinemann |
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1970 | Jane Gaskell | A Sweet Sweet Summer | Hodder & Stoughton | |
| Piers Paul Read | Monk Dawson | Secker & Warburg | ||
| 1971 | Richard Barber | The Knight and Chivalry | Longman | |
| Michael Hastings | Tussy Is Me | Weidenfeld | ||
| Susan Hill | I’m the King of the Castle | Hamish Hamilton | ||
| 1972 | Douglas Dunn | Terry Street | Faber and Faber | |
| Gillian Tindall | Fly Away Home | Hodder & Stoughton | ||
| 1973 | Peter Prince | Play Things | Gollancz | [9] |
| Paul Strathern | A Season in Abyssinia | Macmillan | ||
| Jonathan Street | Prudence Dictates | Hart-Davis | ||
| 1974 | Martin Amis | The Rachel Papers | Jonathan Cape | [10][11] |
| 1975 | No Award | [12] | ||
| 1976 | Dominic Cooper | The Dead of Winter | Chatto & Windus | |
| Ian McEwan | First Love, Last Rites | Jonathan Cape | [13] | |
| 1977 | Richard Holmes | Shelley: The Pursuit | Quartet Books | |
| 1978 | Tom Paulin | A State of Justice | Faber and Faber | |
| Nigel Williams | My Life Closed Twice | Secker & Warburg | ||
| 1979 | Helen Hodgman | Jack & Jill | Duckworth | [14][12] |
| Sara Maitland | Daughter of Jerusalem | Blond & Briggs | ||
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher | Prize | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Ben Wilson | What Price Liberty? | Faber and Faber | £2,000 | [62] |
| Helen Oyeyemi | White is for Witching | Picador | £3,000 | [63][64] | |
| Jacob Polley | Talk of the Town | Picador | £5,000 | [65] | |
| 2011 | Miriam Gamble | The Squirrels Are Dead | Bloodaxe | £3,500 | |
| Alexandra Harris | Romantic Moderns | Thames and Hudson | £3,500 | ||
| Adam O'Riordan | In the Flesh | Chatto Poetry | £3,500 | [66] | |
| 2012 | No award given | [12] | |||
| 2013 | Ned Beauman | The Teleportation Accident | Sceptre | £2,500 | [67] |
| Abi Curtis | The Glass Delusion | Salt | £2,500 | ||
| Joe Stretch | The Adult | Cape | £2,500 | ||
| Lucy Wood | Diving Belles | Bloomsbury | £2,500 | ||
| 2014 | Amy Sackville | Orkney | Granta | £2,000 | |
| Daisy Hildyard | Hunters in the Snow Glass Delusion | Cape | £4,000 | ||
| Nadifa Mohamed | The Orchard of Lost Souls | Simon & Schuster | £4,000 | [68] | |
| 2015 | Jonathan Beckman | How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette, the Stolen Diamonds and the Scandal that Shook the French Throne | John Murray | £2,500 | [69] |
| Liz Berry | Black Country | Chatto & Windus | £2,500 | [69] | |
| Ben Brooks | Lolito | Canongate Books | £2,500 | [69] | |
| Zoe Pilger | Eat My Heart Out | Serpent’s Tail | £2,500 | [69] | |
| 2016 | Jessie Greengrass | An Account Of The Decline Of The Great Auk, According To One Who Saw It | JM Originals | £2,500 | |
| Daisy Hay | Mr & Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance | Chatto & Windus | £2,500 | ||
| Andrew McMillan | Physical | Cape Poetry | £2,500 | [70][71][72] | |
| Thomas Morris | We Don’t Know What We’re Doing | Faber and Faber | £2,500 | ||
| Jack Underwood | Happiness | Faber and Faber | £2,500 | ||
| 2017 | Edmund Gordon | The Invention of Angela Carter | Vintage | £5,000 | [73] |
| Melissa Lee-Houghton | Sunshine | Penned in the Margins | £5,000 | [73] | |
| Martin MacInnes | Infinite Ground | Atlantic Books | £5,000 | ||
| 2018 | Kayo Chingonyi | Kumukanda | Chatto Poetry | £5,250 | [74] |
| Fiona Mozley | Elmet | JM Originals | £5,250 | ||
| Miriam Nash | All the Prayers in the House | Bloodaxe | £5,250 | ||
| 2019 | Raymond Antrobus | The Perseverance | Penned in the Margins | £4,000 | [75][76] |
| Damian Le Bas | The Stopping Places | Chatto & Windus | £4,000 | ||
| Phoebe Power | Shrines of Upper Austria | Carcanet | £4,000 | ||
| Nell Stevens | Mrs Gaskell and Me | Picador | £4,000 | ||