Travelling Scholarships

Joanne Harris (left) and Lemn Sissay (right) with 2022 Travelling Scholarships winners Alice Albinia, Ayisha Malik, Maame Blue, Ben Judah and Dylan Moore at Southwark Cathedral (photograph © Adrian Pope)
Joanne Harris (left) and Lemn Sissay (right) with 2022 Travelling Scholarships winners Alice Albinia, Ayisha Malik, Maame Blue, Ben Judah and Dylan Moore at Southwark Cathedral (photograph © Adrian Pope)
Enabling writers to keep in touch with their colleagues abroad

The Travelling Scholarships were established in 1944 to enable British creative writers to keep in touch with their colleagues abroad. As directed by the anonymous founder of the trust, the Scholarships are administered by the SoA and recipients are nominated by the assessors for the year. Applications for the awards are not accepted.


2023 Travelling Scholarship Award Winners


Sulaiman Addonia
Tim Atkins
Anjali Joseph
Jen Stout
Piers Torday

‘All writers need to travel, and the Travelling Scholarship Award helps them do just that. It’s a particularly exciting prize, as there are no limits on the kind of work it supports. This year’s awards have gone to a dazzling and eclectic mix of writers, from experimental translators, to cutting-edge journalists, genre-bending novelists, and young adult fabulists.’ —Philip Terry

For any queries relating to the prize please contact [email protected]

Charity number 212407


With thanks, the judges of the 2023 travelling scholarships:

Emily Barr

© Charlotte Knee

Emily Barr’s first book, Backpack, won the WHSmith New Talent award on its publication in 2001. Since then she has written a further 18 novels, all of them involving as much travel as she could manage or afford. She has written psychological thrillers, YA, and science fiction. Her first YA book, The One Memory of Flora Banks, was translated into 27 languages, nominated for the Carnegie award and won the Prix Farniente in Belgium. She teaches for Curtis Brown Creative and Faber Academy, and lives in Cornwall with her family. 

Gabriel Gbadamosi

© John Folley

Gabriel Gbadamosi is an Irish and Nigerian poet, playwright and critic. His London novel Vauxhall (Telegram, 2013) won the Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize and Best International Novel at the Sharjah Book Fair. He was AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellow at the Pinter Centre, Goldsmiths in European and African performance; a Judith E. Wilson Fellow for creative writing at Cambridge University; and Writer in Residence at the Manchester Royal Exchange. Plays include Stop and Search (Arcola Theatre), Hotel Orpheu (Schaubühne, Berlin), and for radio The Long, Hot Summer of ’76 (BBC Radio 3) which won the Richard Imison Award. He presented BBC Radio 3’s arts and ideas programme Night Waves and is the founding editor of WritersMosaic. 

Anne McElvoy

Anne McElvoy is Executive Editor of the Economist, host of the interview podcast “The Economist Asks” and a frequent BBC presenter on Radio 4. She also writes a weekly politics column for the Evening Standard and on theatre for “The Critic”. Anne has been a foreign correspondent in Berlin, the Balkans and Moscow. She is a member of the education committee of the Royal Opera House and on the education board of the World Economic Forum at Davos. Her books are a history of East Germany, “The Saddled Cow” and “Man Without a Face”, co-authored with Markus Wolf. Her languages are German, Russian and French.

© Marc Nair

Alvin Pang

Alvin Pang, PhD, is a Singaporean poet and editor and Adjunct Professor of RMIT University. A 2022 Dublin Literary Award judge and Civitella Ranieri Fellow, his writings have been translated into more than twenty languages worldwide.
His recent books include What Happened: Poems 1997–2017 (2017), Uninterrupted time (2019) and Det som ger oss våra namn (2022).

Phillip Terry

Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is a poet, translator, and a writer of fiction. He has translated the work of Georges Perec and Michèle Métail, and is the author of the novel tapestry, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. His poetry and experimental translations include Quennets, Dante’s Inferno, and The Lacsaux Notebooks, an anthology of Ice Age poetry. The Penguin Book of Oulipo, which he edited, was published in Penguin Modern Classics in 2020.

2023 Winners: Sulaiman Addonia, Tim Atkins, Anjali Joseph, Jen Stout, Piers Torday. Each received £1,600

2022 Winners: Linda Brogan, Maame Blue, Dylan Moore, Ayisha Malik, Ben Judah and Alice Albinia. Each received £1,333.33

2021 Winners: Clare Pollard, Guy Gunaratne, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Tom Stevenson and Lola Okolosie. Each received £1,600

2020 Winners: Luke Brown, Inua Ellams, Georgina Lawton, Neil Rollinson, and Ahdaf Soueif. Each received £1,600.

2019 Winners: Kathryn Hughes, Damian Le Bas, Nadifa Mohamed, Johny Pitts, and Gwendoline Riley. Each received £1,600.

2018 Winners: Jenn AshworthTash AwJessie GreengrassJames Harpur, and Sudhir Hazareesingh. Each received £1,575.

2017 Winners: Amy LiptrotRoss Raisin, and James Sheard.  Each received £2,500.

2016 Winners: Jamie BartlettDavid CranePeter Oswald, and David Szalay. Each recieved £1,750.

Past winners of the awards have included:

C. Day Lewis, V.S. Pritchett, William Samson, Dylan Thomas, Laurie Lee, William Golding, Margaret Drabble, Stevie Smith, Naomi Lewis, Ronald Blythe, William Trevor, Maureen Duffy, Edward Blishen, Fay Weldon, Hilary Spurling, A.L. Barker, Sybille Bedford, Adrian Mitchell, Robert Nye, Jenny Diski, Robert Macfarlane and Helen Simpson.