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 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize is closed for submissions.
The 2024 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize winner
Soula Emmanuel for Wild Geese (Footnote Press)
Photography © Natalie Thorpe
The 2024 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize runner-up
Cecile Pin for Wandering Souls (HarperCollins UK, 4th Estate)
Photography © Natalie Thorpe
The 2024 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize shortlist
Santanu Bhattacharya for One Small Voice (Fig Tree, Penguin Random House)
Isabella Hammad for Enter Ghost (Jonathan Cape)
This year’s Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize shortlist is a treasure trove of wonderous storytelling from four writers who know that the personal is the political. Soula Emmanuel’s Copenhagen-based Wild Geese is observant and poetic. Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin journeys from Vietnam to London, reminding us of the suffering caused by the loss of one’s sense of place and belonging. Santanu Bhattacharya’s India-set One Small Voice triumphs the resilience of the human spirit from beginning to end. And Isabella Hammad’s Palestine-focussed Enter Ghost comments on the nature of resistance with care and poise. These books should be cherished for their social and political insights as well as for the splendour of their prose.
— Kerry Young, 2024 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize judge
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 Drusilla Harvey Access Fund, providing access grants to help authors attend events, residencies and retreats.
With thanks, the judges of the 2025 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize:
Dr Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
Dr Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is a writer and academic whose work has a largely environmental focus. Publications include the nature writing books Twelve Words for Moss (2023) and The Grassling: A Geological Memoir (2019), the poetry collections Of Sea (2021) and Swims (2017) and literary criticism A Social Biography of Contemporary Innovative Poetry Communities: The Gift, the Wager and Poethics (2017). Twelve Words for Moss was shortlisted for the Wainwright and Jhalak prizes and a Sunday Times and Countryfile Book of the Year. She is a Guardian Country Diarist and judge for the Women’s Prize 2025.
Derek Owusu
Derek Owusu is an award-winning writer and poet from North London. His first novel, That Reminds Me, and the first work of fiction to be published by Stormzy’s Merky Books imprint, won the Desmond Elliott Prize for best debut novel published in the UK and Ireland. His second novel, Losing the Plot, was published in 2022 and was Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and Jhalak Prize. In 2023 he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.
Jini Reddy
Born in the UK to Indian parents from South Africa, Jini grew up in Montreal, Canada, and lived in France before working in book publishing in London and Hong Kong. She is the author of Wanderland (2020), shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year and for the Wainwright Prize. Her first book, Wild Times (2016) won the British Guild of Travel Writers’ Adele Evans Award. She has contributed to anthologies, including the landmark Women on Nature (2021) and the forthcoming Freewheeling (2025). Her texts have been displayed in London, notably at the Royal Festival Hall, where she was commissioned to write six poems, the sole writer among twenty visual artists. As a travel and features writer, Jini’s byline has appeared in The Guardian, The i paper, The Times, Sunday Times Style, Financial Times, The Sunday Telegraph, TIME and many more publications. In 2019, she was named one of National Geographic’s Women of Impact and in 2021, Jini delivered the inaugural Jan Morris Lecture at the Hay Festival in Wales. She is an Advisory Fellow at the Royal Literary Fund and coaches aspiring writers.
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 (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 (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