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 2024 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize:
Aamer Hussein
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.
Yara Rodrigues Fowler
Yara Rodrigues Fowler is from South London. Her first novel, Stubborn Archivist, was published in 2019 and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Desmond Elliot Prizes, and Yara was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. Yara’s second novel, there are more things, was published in 2022 and nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and Goldsmiths Prize. As a work in progress, there are more things received the John C Lawrence Award from the Society of Authors and was shortlisted for the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award 2019. It was one of the Sunday Times, BBC Culture and New Statesman’s books of the Year. In 2023, Yara was chosen as one of Granta’s ‘Best Young British Novelists’ in their once-a-decade list. Yara is also a part-time climate justice organiser.
Kerry Young
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 (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