The Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize

Joanne Harris (left) and Lemn Sissay (right) with 2022 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize runner-up Jamie O'Connell at Southwark Cathedral (photograph © Adrian Pope)
Joanne Harris (left) and Lemn Sissay (right) with 2022 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize runner-up Jamie O'Connell at Southwark Cathedral (photograph © Adrian Pope)
For a novel focusing on the experience of travel away from home

In memory of Malcolm Lowry and endowed by Gordon Bowker, his biographer, and Ramdei Bowker.

A prize awarded to a UK or Irish writer, or a writer currently resident in those countries, for a novel focusing on the experience of travel away from home.

Inspired by Malcolm Lowry’s novel, Under the Volcano and in celebration of its author, the prize aims to inspire literary excellence and encourage writers to travel and to write from the resulting experience.

The winner will receive £2,000 and the runner-up £750.

The 2024 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize has now closed for submissions.


The 2023 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize Winner


Aamina Ahmad for The Return of Faraz Ali published by Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton

‘In her ambitious and accomplished first novel, Aamina Ahmad chronicles the lives of her protagonist and his fragmented family against a backdrop of wars, divided nations, and  turbulent national and international histories. Spanning several decades, this is a skillfully crafted evocation of place, time and memory, at the meeting point of private tragedy and public turmoil.’ —Aamer Hussein

The 2023 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize Runner-Up:

David Park for Spies in Canaan published by Bloomsbury Publishing

The 2023 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize Shortlist:

Julia Armfield for Our Wives Under the Sea published by Picador, Pan Macmillan

Vesna Goldsworthy for Iron Curtain: A Love Story published by Chatto & Windus, Vintage, Penguin Random House UK

Alex Hyde for Violets published by Granta Books

Anjali Joseph for Keeping in Touch published by Scribe UK

If you are interested in buying any of the books shortlisted here, please visit Bookshop.org. A percentage of each sale will go to the Authors’ Contingency Fund, providing hardship grants to authors in financial difficulty.


With thanks, the judges of the 2023 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize:

Aamer Hussein

© Samuel Shimon

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1955, and moved to London in his teens. He has been writing fiction since the mid-‘eighties, and his work has been widely anthologised in many languages including Spanish, Arabic, Japanese and Urdu. He is the author of the short story collections, Mirror to the Sun (1993); This Other Salt (1999); Turquoise (2002); Cactus Town and other stories (2002); Insomnia (2007); Another Gulmohar Tree (2009), a novella, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book); and The Cloud Messenger (2011). He is also the editor of Kahani: Short Stories by Pakistani Women (2005), a revised and extended edition of Hoops of Fire. 

https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/aamer-hussein/

Zeba Talkhani

Zeba Talkhani was born in Sirsi, South India and grew up in Saudi Arabia’s expatriate community before moving to India, Germany, and ultimately the UK, where she works in publishing. Her memoir My Past is a Foreign Country charts this journey and explores themes such as patriarchy, mother-daughter relationships and self-compassion. It’s received praise in The Times, British Vogue, Stylist Magazine, The Scotsman and even by Hillary Clinton. She recently published The Most Exciting Eid, her first children’s book.

Kerry Young

© Françoise Paton

Kerry Young is the author of three novels published by Bloomsbury – ‘Pao’, ‘Gloria’ and ‘Show Me A Mountain’, which have been variously shortlisted/nominated for the Costa First Novel Award, Commonwealth Book Prize, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, East Midlands Book Award and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She is a Project Consultant at the Royal Literary Fund, an Arvon tutor and an Advisory Board member at The Literary Consultancy.

2023

Winner: Aamina Ahmad for The Return of Faraz Ali (Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton)
Runner-up: David Park for Spies in Canaan (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Shortlist:
Julia Armfield for Our Wives Under the Sea (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
Vesna Goldsworthy for Iron Curtain: A Love Story (Chatto & Windus, Vintage)
Alex Hyde for Violets (Granta Books)
Anjali Joseph for Keeping in Touch (Scribe UK)

2022

Winner: Sheila Llewellyn for Winter in Tabriz (Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton)
Runner-up: Jamie O’Connell for Diving For Pearls (Doubleday/Transworld/Penguin Random House)
Shortlist:
Olivia Sudjic for Asylum Road (Bloomsbury)
Catherine Menon for Fragile Monsters (Penguin Books)
Tessa McWatt for The Snow Line (Scribe UK)

Gordon Bowker

Gordon Bowker © Martin Durrant

Gordon Bowker (1934-2019) was an acclaimed literary biographer who wrote books on the authors Malcolm Lowry, James Joyce and George Orwell. Bowker worked as a lecturer and wrote dramas and documentaries for radio and television before he turned his attention to writing biographies. His work has been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence, was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA West Literary Award and he was the runner-up in 2013 for the American PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. In 1993, he published his first biography, Pursued by Furies: a Life of Malcolm Lowry, which became a New York Times bestseller.

The Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize was founded in memory of Malcolm Lowry and endowed by Gordon and his wife Ramdei Bowker.

Malcolm Lowry

Malcolm Lowry © New York Times

Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957) was an English novelist, and short story writer known for his book, Under the Volcano, which was first published in 1947. Lowry almost went blind as a child until a successful operation restored his vision. He studied at the University of Cambridge and published his first novel first novel Ultramarine in 1933. He married his first wife, Jan Gabrial, in Paris in 1934. They moved to the United States of America together before his wife left him in 1937. During his lifetime, Lowry would work as a deckhand on a ship bound to China, would voluntarily admit himself to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York City and would later be thrown into a Mexican jail after being suspected of being a Spanish spy. He met his second wife, Margerie Bonnner, in Hollywood whom he lived with up until his death.


Prize logo illustration © Annabelle Carvell