On Thursday 29 June hundreds of SoA members joined us for the 2023 SoA Awards and Summer Party to celebrate fiction, poetry and children’s literature.
Joanne Harris hosted the event, welcoming more than 300 guests in-person to Southwark Cathedral and many more online. Following Val McDermid’s inspiring keynote on the importance of prizes and the reality of the author experience in 2023, we shared more than £100,000 in prizes with over 30 writers, poets and illustrators. The prizegiving included the inaugural Authors with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses (ADCI) Literary Prize, which encourages greater positive representation of disability in literature.
- Read the 2023 SoA Awards news release
- Buy the books (bookshop.org – all purchases result in a contribution to the SoA’s Contingency Fund, providing hardship grants to authors in financial need)
Many thanks to everyone who joined us on the day – in-venue or online – for helping to make the evening so special.
Speeches and prizegiving
The speeches and prizegiving were streamed live to an international audience.
Meet some of the 2023 winners
Somerset Maugham Award winner Travis Alabanza, Cholmondeley Award winner Tamar Yoseloff, Travelling Scholarship winner Jen Stout and Paul Torday Memorial Prize winner Bonnie Garmus shared their thoughts with us on the night.
There’s so many different people that go into making a book, and I feel like awards give a really nice chance to celebrate not just the author, but the publisher, the marketing team, the graphic designer, your agent, all those people get to then join in on the celebration of the work and bring visibility to it.
Travis Alabanza on winning a 2023 Somerset Maugham award.
Gallery
Event photographs © Adrian Pope.
I wasn’t able to attend, not even on line so thank you for this opportunity to see it all in retrospect.