The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism is awarded for literary criticism by the University of Iowa on behalf of the

Truman Capote Literary Trust The Truman Capote Literary Trust is an American charitable trust established in 1994 by Truman Capote's literary executor, Alan U. Schwartz, pursuant to Capote's will. Origin Capote died in 1984 and his will established a lifetime annuity for his ...

. The value of the award is $30,000 (USD), and is said to be the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language.Helen Small wins 2008 Truman Capote Award for literary criticism
University of Iowa news release, April 30, 2008. The formal name of the prize is the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, commemorating both Capote and his friend

Newton Arvin Fredrick Newton Arvin (August 25, 1900 – March 21, 1963) was an American literary critic and academic. He achieved national recognition for his studies of individual nineteenth-century American authors. After teaching at Smith College in N ...

, who was a distinguished critic and Smith College professor until he lost his job in 1960 after his homosexuality was publicly exposed."Capote Trust Is Formed To Offer Literary Prizes"
'' New York Times'', March 25, 1994.

Recipients

*2022 Heather Clark - ''Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath'' *2021

Kay Ryan Kay Ryan (born September 21, 1945) is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. From 2008 to 2010 she was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate. In 2011 she was named ...

- ''Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose'' *2020 Fred Moten - ''Black and Blur'' *2019

Brent Hayes Edwards Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Early life Edwards attended Yale as an undergraduate, then completed an MA and PhD at Columbia. Career Teaching Edwards has taught at Rutgers Univ ...

- ''Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination'' *2018

Robert Hass Robert L. Hass (born March 1, 1941) is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection ''Time and Materials: Poems 1997 ...

- ''A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry'' *2017 Gillian Beer - ''Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll'' *2016 Kevin Birmingham - ''The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses'' *2015

Stanley Plumly Stanley Plumly (May 23, 1939 – April 11, 2019) was an American poet and the director of University of Maryland, College Park's creative writing program. Plumly grew up in Ohio and Virginia and was educated at Wilmington College in Ohio and at ...

- ''The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner With Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb'' *2014 Fredric Jameson - ''The Antinomies of Realism'' *2013

Marina Warner Dame Marina Sarah Warner, (born 9 November 1946) is an English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publicatio ...

- ''Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights'' *2012

Elaine Showalter Elaine Showalter (born January 21, 1941) is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocr ...

- ''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 Helen Wenda Small (born 23 October 1964) is the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Merton College, Oxford. She was previously a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. Early life Small was ...

- ''The Long Life'' *2007

William H. Gass William Howard Gass (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven vol ...

- ''A Temple of Texts'' *2006 Geoffrey Hartman and Daniel T. O'Hara - ''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 Declan Kiberd (born 24 May 1951) is an Irish writer and scholar with an interest in modern Irish literature, both in the English and Irish languages, which he often approaches through the lens of postcolonial theory. He is also interested in th ...

- ''Irish Classics'' *2001

Malcolm Bowie Malcolm McNaughtan Bowie FBA (; 5 May 1943 – 28 January 2007) was a British academic, and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge from 2002 to 2006. An acclaimed scholar of French literature, Bowie wrote several books on Marcel Proust, as well a ...

- ''Proust Among the Stars'' *2000

Elaine Scarry Elaine Scarry (born June 30, 1946) is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests inc ...

- ''Dreaming by the Book'' and Philip Fisher - ''Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction'' *1999

Charles Rosen Charles Welles Rosen (May 5, 1927December 9, 2012) was an American pianist and writer on music. He is remembered for his career as a concert pianist, for his recordings, and for his many writings, notable among them the book '' The Classical St ...

- ''Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen'' *1998 John Kerrigan - ''Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon'' *1997

John Felstiner John Felstiner (July 5, 1936 – February 24, 2017), Professor Emeritus of English at Stanford University, was an American literary critic, translator, and poet. His interests included poetry in various languages, environmental and ecologic po ...

- ''Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew'' *1996

Helen Vendler Helen Hennessy Vendler (born April 30, 1933) is an American literary critic and is Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University. Life and career Helen Hennessy Vendler was born on April 30, 1933, in Boston, Massachusetts, to George ...

- ''The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition''

References

{{Reflist

External links

Recipients of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism
Literary criticism American literary awards Awards established in 1996 Literary awards honoring lifetime achievement 1996 establishments in Iowa