Big Prize for Small
30 Apr 08
Dr Helen Small, Lecturer at Oxford University's English Faculty and Fellow of Pembroke College, has been awarded the 2008 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for her book The Long Life.
The $30,000 award (around £15,000) is the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language and is administered for the Truman Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Dr Small will formally receive the award in September at a ceremony at the University of Iowa.
Dr Small said: 'I'm delighted, honoured, and currently reading Newton Arvin - in whose memory this award was established - with pleasure and admiration. Until The Long Life my research and writing were concentrated primarily in the Victorian period, so this book represented a big elastication for me.
Dr Helen SmallI'm delighted, honoured, and currently reading Newton Arvin - in whose memory this award was established - with pleasure and admiration
'I held a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship from 2001 to 2004, spending much of it as a Visiting Scholar at New York University. Without that extended period of leave I could not have attempted anything on this scale, so I am deeply grateful to the Leverhulme Trust.'
The Long Life was published in 2007 by Oxford University Press. It examines old age in literature and moral philosophy by inviting readers to range widely from the writings of Plato through to recent philosophical work by Derek Parfit, Bernard Williams and others, and from Shakespeare's King Lear through to Balzac and Dickens and more recent writing by Philip Roth and J M Coetzee.
Dr Small is also the author of Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and the Female Insanity, 1800-1865, and the editor or co-editor of books including Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830-1970, Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer, Public Intellectual, and editions of works by Dickens, Menie Muriel Dowie and George Eliot.
The Long Life was selected for the Capote Award by an international panel of prominent critics and writers - Michael Wood, James Wood, Garrett Stewart, Elaine Scarry, John Kerrigan and Terry Castle - each of whom nominated two books. Books of general literary criticism in English, published during the last four years, are eligible. After reading all the nominated books, each critic ranked the nominees.
The Truman Capote Estate announced the establishment of the Truman Capote Literary Trust in 1994, during a breakfast at Tiffany's in New York City, on the 40th anniversary of the publication of Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's. It was stipulated in the author's will, and the Annual Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin reflects Capote's frequently expressed concern for the health of literary criticism in the English language. The award rewards and encourages excellence in the field.
Past winners of the Capote Award include Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and Malcolm Bowie from Oxford University.