The Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer's Award
Submissions open for £20k Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award. The prize grants £20,000 annually to two writers for a yet-to-be-published book relating to the Americas. Applicants are expected to make extensive use of the British Library’s Americas collections. Submit your application from this Monday.
The Eccles Institute at the British Library and Hay Festival Global are delighted to open the call for submissions for the 2025 Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award. Now in its fourtteenth year, the prize grants £20,000 annually to two writers – of fiction and/or non-fiction - for a yet-to-be-published book relating to the Americas (North, Central and South America and the Caribbean).
Applicants are expected to make extensive use of the British Library’s Americas collections and curatorial support via a research residency of between six months to a year to develop their idea. In addition, winners will receive £20,000 in four quarterly grants and special access to the Eccles Institute Platform at Hay Festival events in Wales, Mexico, Peru and Colombia, as well as the events programme at the British Library, to promote their published work.
A number of critically acclaimed books have been published with the support of the Eccles Institute and Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award including Bob Stanley’s Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Naomi Wood’s Mrs. Hemingway and The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science by Andrea Wulf.
The 2024 Award holders are Hannah Lowe and Alia Trabucco Zerán, who are working with the Eccles Institute and British Library curators to develop their forthcoming books, Moy: In Search of Nelsa Lowe and Impudence ('Descaro'). They will be participating in events at the British Library in 2024 and beyond.
Submissions for the 2025 Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award open on 20 May and will close on 12 September 2024. The shortlist announcement will take place at early November and the winners will be declared at the end of November 2024.
The Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer's Award is a highly prestigious annual literary award of £20,000 for a current writing project exploring the Americas.
The award facilitates and inspires world-class storytelling in the UK and across the Americas, supporting writers in the creative stage of a new fiction or non-fiction project. The prize grants a year-long residency at the British Library and access to curatorial expertise within the Library’s world class Americas collections.
The Writer’s Award is celebrated globally through a dynamic series of events profiling winners at Hay Festival editions in Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Wales, as awardees join forces with other celebrated writers and thinkers to explore themes central to the Library’s Americas collections, championing new perspectives to audiences in the UK and Latin America.
What's the prize?
Two winners will hold the Writer’s Award for one year from 1 January 2025, and will receive:
£20,000, in four quarterly grants
Unique access to the expertise of the British Library’s curatorial staff
The chance to appear at future Hay Festival Global editions with their published work.
The winners will also have the opportunity to work with the Eccles Institute to develop and facilitate activities and events related to their research at the British Library.
They’ll be in good company. Previous winners include...
2024
Hannah Lowe and Alia Trabucco Zerán are the current Writer’s Award holders. Lowe won for a lyrical, hybrid memoir, Moy: In Search of Nelsa Lowe, where she uses the intimate story of her Chinese Jamaican aunt as a device for exploring the history of the Chinese in Jamaica. Trabucco Zerán won for Impudence ('Descaro'), where she weaves fiction with memoir and essay to explore portrayals of Latin American women and our relationship with the female face, identity and loss.
2023
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo won for Dark Eye Place which tells the story of a family house, passed down to the daughter of each generation. Jarred McGinnis won for The Mountain Weight, which mines his family’s history, from the American Civil War to the present day, to examine themes of masculinity, family and migration.
2022
Philip Clark won for Sound and the City, a history of the sound of New York City and an investigation into what makes New York sound like New York. Javier Montes won for Trópico de Londres (Tropic of London), telling the story of Latin American artists, writers and intellectual exiles in London during the second half of the 20th century.
2021
Pola Oloixarac won for Atlas Literario del Amazonas (Literary Atlas of the Amazon) – a work of creative non-fiction revealing the secret history of the Amazon. Imaobong Umoren won for Empire Without End: A New History of Britain and the Caribbean – an expansive new history of the 400 year relationship between Britain and the Caribbean.
2020
Novelist and writer Chloe Aridjis for her novel Reports from the Land of the Bats and writer and editor Daniel Saldaña París for his novel Principio de mediocridad.
2019
Writer Rachel Hewitt and novelist Sara Taylor. Hewitt is a Lecturer in Creative Writing, and author, Sara Taylor is a novelist as well as co-director and editor of creative-critical publisher Seam Editions.
Portrait of the award winners by Clara Molden.
2018
Novelist and short story writer Stuart Evers, and the author, librettist and screenwriter Tessa McWatt.
2017
Author Hannah Kohler and writer and musician Bob Stanley.
2016
Author and editor William Atkins, and author Alison MacLeod. Atkins' The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places was published by Faber in 2018.
2015
Professor Sarah Churchwell and novelist Benjamin Markovits. Markovits' novel A Weekend in New York was published by Faber in 2018.
2014
Critic and writer Olivia Laing and journalist Erica Wagner. Laing's book The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone was published by Picador in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Wagner's Chief Engineer: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge was published in 2017 by Bloomsbury.
2013
Historian Andrea Wulf and poet and novelist John Burnside. Wulf’s book The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the lost Hero of Science was published by John Murray in October 2015 and won the 2015 Costa Biography Award and 2016 Royal Society Science Book Prize. Burnside's novel Ashland and Vine was published by Jonathan Cape in 2017.
2012
Writer Sheila Rowbotham and novelist Naomi Wood. During her 2012 residency, Wood researched her novel, Mrs Hemingway, which was published by Picador in 2014. Rowbotham's group biography Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers, and Radicals in Britain and the United States was published by Verso in 2016.How do I apply?
Details of how to apply for the 2024 award will be revealed in spring 2023.
Portraits of the 2012–2018 award winners by Eccles Photography Fellow Ander McIntyre.
About the Eccles Centre
The Eccles Centre for American Studies was founded in 1991 to increase awareness and use of the British Library's extensive collections of books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers and sound recordings related to the United States, Canada and the Caribbean.
Housed within the British Library, the Centre works in collaboration with the Library's Americas curatorial team and external partners interested in the promotion of North American studies in the UK. The Centre runs a diverse events programme, funds research, offers training in the North American collections, and produces publications and digital exhibitions designed to introduce the quality and breadth of the collections.
