# Somerset Maugham Award

The Somerset Maugham Award is a British literary prize given each year by the Society of Authors. Set up by William Somerset Maugham in 1947 the awards enable young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience in foreign countries. The awards go to writers under the age of 35 with works published in the year before the award; the work can be either non-fiction, fiction or poetry.
Since 1964 multiple winners have usually been chosen in the same year. In 1975 and in 2012 the award was not given.

## List of winners
### 1940s

Somerset Maugham Award winners, 1947–1949 :
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher |
| 1947 | A. L. Barker | Innocents | Hogarth Press |
| 1948 | P. H. Newby | Journey to the Interior | Jonathan Cape |
| 1949 | Hamish Henderson | Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica | John Lehmann |

### 1950s

Somerset Maugham Award winners, 1950–1959 :
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher |
| 1950 | Nigel Kneale | Tomato Cain & Other Stories | Collins |
| 1951 | Roland Camberton | Scamp | John Lehmann |
| 1952 | Francis King | The Dividing Stream | Longman |
| 1953 | Emyr Humphreys | Hear and Forgive | Gollancz |
| 1954 | Doris Lessing | Five Short Novels | Michael Joseph |
| 1955 | Kingsley Amis | Lucky Jim | Gollancz |
| 1956 | Elizabeth Jennings | A Way of Looking | Deutsch |
| 1957 | George Lamming | In the Castle of My Skin | Michael Joseph |
| 1958 | John Wain | Preliminary Essays | Macmillan |
| 1959 | Thom Gunn | A Sense of Movement | Faber and Faber |

### 1960s

Somerset Maugham Award winners, 1960–1969 :
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher |
| 1960 | Ted Hughes | The Hawk in the Rain | Faber and Faber |
| 1961 | V. S. Naipaul | Miguel Street | Deutsch |
| 1962 | Hugh Thomas | The Spanish Civil War | Eyre & Spottiswoode |
| 1963 | David Storey | Flight Into Camden | Longman |
| 1964 | Dan Jacobson | Time of Arrival | Weidenfeld |
| 1964 | John Le Carré | The Spy Who Came in from the Cold | Gollancz |
| 1965 | Peter Everett | Negatives | Jonathan Cape |
| 1966 | Michael Frayn | The Tin Men | Collins |
| 1966 | Julian Mitchell | The White Father | Constable |
| 1967 | B.S. Johnson | Trawl | Secker & Warburg |
| 1967 | Andrew Sinclair | The Better Half | Jonathan Cape |
| 1968 | Paul Bailey | At The Jerusalem | Jonathan Cape |
| 1968 | Seamus Heaney | Death of a Naturalist | Faber and Faber |
| 1969 | Angela Carter | Several Perceptions | Heinemann |

### 1970s

Somerset Maugham Award winners, 1970–1979 :
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher |
| 1970 | Jane Gaskell | A Sweet Sweet Summer | Hodder & Stoughton |
| 1970 | Piers Paul Read | Monk Dawson | Secker & Warburg |
| 1971 | Richard Barber | The Knight and Chivalry | Longman |
| 1971 | Michael Hastings | Tussy Is Me | Weidenfeld |
| 1971 | Susan Hill | I’m the King of the Castle | Hamish Hamilton |
| 1972 | Douglas Dunn | Terry Street | Faber and Faber |
| 1972 | Gillian Tindall | Fly Away Home | Hodder & Stoughton |
| 1973 | Peter Prince | Play Things | Gollancz |
| 1973 | Paul Strathern | A Season in Abyssinia | Macmillan |
| 1973 | Jonathan Street | Prudence Dictates | Hart-Davis |
| 1974 | Martin Amis | The Rachel Papers | Jonathan Cape |
| 1975 | No Award | No Award | No Award |
| 1976 | Dominic Cooper | The Dead of Winter | Chatto & Windus |
| 1976 | Ian McEwan | First Love, Last Rites | Jonathan Cape |
| 1977 | Richard Holmes | Shelley: The Pursuit | Quartet Books |
| 1978 | Tom Paulin | A State of Justice | Faber and Faber |
| 1978 | Nigel Williams | My Life Closed Twice | Secker & Warburg |
| 1979 | Helen Hodgman | Jack & Jill | Duckworth |
| 1979 | Sara Maitland | Daughter of Jerusalem | Blond & Briggs |

### 1980s

Somerset Maugham Award winners, 1980–1989 :
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher |
| 1980 | Humphrey Carpenter | The Inklings | Allen & Unwin |
| 1980 | Max Hastings | Bomber Command | Michael Joseph |
| 1980 | Christopher Reid | Arcadia | Oxford University Press |
| 1981 | Julian Barnes | Metroland | Jonathan Cape |
| 1981 | Clive Sinclair | Hearts of Gold | Allison & Busby |
| 1981 | A. N. Wilson | The Healing Art | Secker & Warburg |
| 1982 | William Boyd | A Good Man in Africa | Hamish Hamilton |
| 1982 | Adam Mars-Jones | Lantern Lecture | Faber and Faber |
| 1983 | Lisa St Aubin de Teran | Keepers of the House | Jonathan Cape |
| 1984 | Peter Ackroyd | The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde | Hamish Hamilton |
| 1984 | Timothy Garton Ash | The Polish Revolution: Solidarity | Jonathan Cape |
| 1984 | Sean O'Brien | The Indoor Park | Bloodaxe Books |
| 1985 | Blake Morrison | Dark Glasses | Chatto & Windus |
| 1985 | Jeremy Reed | By the Fisheries | Jonathan Cape |
| 1985 | Jane Rogers | Her Living Image | Faber and Faber |
| 1986 | Patricia Ferguson | Family Myths and Legends | Andre Deutsch |
| 1986 | Adam Nicolson | Frontiers | Weidenfeld & Nicolson |
| 1986 | Tim Parks | Tongues of Flame | Heinemann |
| 1987 | Stephen Gregory | The Cormorant | Heinemann |
| 1987 | Janni Howker | Isaac Campion | Julia MacRae |
| 1987 | Andrew Motion | The Lamberts | Chatto & Windus |
| 1988 | Jimmy Burns | The Land That Lost Its Heroes | Bloomsbury |
| 1988 | Carol Ann Duffy | Selling Manhattan | Anvil |
| 1988 | Matthew Kneale | Whore Banquets | Gollancz Heinemann |
| 1989 | Rupert Christiansen | Romantic Affinities | Bodley Head |
| 1989 | Alan Hollinghurst | The Swimming-Pool Library | Chatto & Windus |
| 1989 | Deirdre Madden | The Birds of the Innocent Wood | Faber and Faber |

### 1990s

Somerset Maugham Award winners, 1990–1999 :
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher |
| 1990 | Mark Hudson | Our Grandmothers' Drums | Secker & Warburg |
| 1990 | Sam North | The Automatic Man | Secker & Warburg |
| 1990 | Nicholas Shakespeare | The Vision of Elena Silves | Collins Harvill |
| 1991 | Peter Benson | The Other Occupant | Macmillan |
| 1991 | Lesley Glaister | Honour Thy Father | Secker & Warburg |
| 1991 | Helen Simpson | Four Bare Legs in a Bed | Heinemann |
| 1992 | Geoff Dyer | But Beautiful | Jonathan Cape |
| 1992 | Lawrence Norfolk | Lempriere’s Dictionary | S. Stevenson |
| 1992 | Gerard Woodward | Householder | Chatto & Windus |
| 1993 | Dea Birkett | Jella | Gollancz |
| 1993 | Glyn Maxwell | Out of the Rain | Bloodaxe Books |
| 1993 | Duncan McLean | Bucket of Tongues | Secker & Warburg |
| 1994 | Jackie Kay | Other Lovers | Bloodaxe Books |
| 1994 | A. L. Kennedy | Looking for the Possible Dance | Secker & Warburg |
| 1994 | Philip Marsden | Crossing Place | HarperCollins |
| 1995 | Patrick French | Younghusband | HarperCollins |
| 1995 | Simon Garfield | The End of Innocence | Faber and Faber |
| 1995 | Kathleen Jamie | The Queen of Sheba | Bloodaxe Books |
| 1995 | Laura Thompson | The Dogs | Chatto & Windus |
| 1996 | Katherine Pierpoint | Truffle Beds | Faber and Faber |
| 1996 | Alan Warner | Morvern Callar | Vintage |
| 1997 | Rhidian Brook | The Testimony of Taliesin Jones | Flamingo |
| 1997 | Kate Clanchy | Slattern | Chatto & Windus |
| 1997 | Philip Hensher | Kitchen Venom | Hamish Hamilton |
| 1997 | Francis Spufford | I May Be Some Time | Faber and Faber |
| 1998 | Rachel Cusk | The Country Life | Picador, Macmillan |
| 1998 | Jonathan Rendall | This Bloody Mary is the Last Thing I Own | Faber and Faber |
| 1998 | Kate Summerscale | The Queen of Whale Cay | Fourth Estate |
| 1998 | Robert Twigger | Angry White Pyjamas | Indigo |
| 1999 | Andrea Ashworth | Once In a House On Fire | Picador, Macmillan |
| 1999 | Paul Farley | The Boy from the Chemist Is Here To See You | Picador, Macmillan |
| 1999 | Giles Foden | The Last King of Scotland | Faber and Faber |
| 1999 | Jonathan Freedland | Bring Home the Revolution | Fourth Estate |

### 2000s

Somerset Maugham Award winners, 2000–2009 :
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher |
| 2000 | Bella Bathurst | The Lighthouse Stevensons | HarperCollins |
| 2000 | Sarah Waters | Affinity | Virago Press |
| 2001 | Edward Platt | Leadville | Picador, Macmillan |
| 2001 | Ben Rice | Pobby and Dingan | Jonathan Cape |
| 2002 | Charlotte Hobson | Black Earth City | Granta |
| 2002 | Marcel Theroux | The Paperchase | Abacus |
| 2003 | William Fiennes | The Snow Geese | Picador, Macmillan |
| 2003 | Hari Kunzru | The Impressionist | Hamish Hamilton |
| 2003 | Jon McGregor | If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things | Bloomsbury |
| 2004 | Mark Blayney | Two Kinds of Silence | Manuscript Publishing |
| 2004 | Robert Macfarlane | Mountains of the Mind | Granta |
| 2004 | Charlotte Mendelson | Daughters of Jerusalem | Picador, Macmillan |
| 2005 | Justin Hill | Passing Under Heaven | Abacus |
| 2005 | Maggie O'Farrell | The Distance Between Us | Review |
| 2006 | Chris Cleave | Incendiary | Chatto & Windus |
| 2006 | Owen Sheers | Skirrid Hill | Seren Books |
| 2006 | Zadie Smith | On Beauty | Hamish Hamilton |
| 2007 | Horatio Clare | Running for the Hills | John Murray |
| 2007 | James Scudamore | The Amnesia Clinic | Harvill Secker |
| 2008 | Steven Hall | The Raw Shark Texts | Canongate Books |
| 2008 | Nick Laird | On Purpose | Faber and Faber |
| 2008 | Gwendoline Riley | Joshua Spassky | Cape |
| 2008 | Adam Thirlwell | Miss Herbert (US title: The Delighted States) | Cape |
| 2009 | Alice Albinia | Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River | John Murray |
| 2009 | Adam Foulds | The Broken Word | Cape |
| 2009 | Rodge Glass | Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography | Bloomsbury |
| 2009 | Henry Hitchings | The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English | John Murray |
| 2009 | Thomas Leveritt | The Exchange Rate Between Love and Money | Harvill Secker |
| 2009 | Helen Walsh | Once Upon a Time in England | Canongate Books |

### 2010s

Somerset Maugham Award winners, 2010–2019 :
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher | Prize |
| 2010 | Ben Wilson | What Price Liberty? | Faber and Faber | £2,000 |
| 2010 | Helen Oyeyemi | White is for Witching | Picador | £3,000 |
| 2010 | Jacob Polley | Talk of the Town | Picador | £5,000 |
| 2011 | Miriam Gamble | The Squirrels Are Dead | Bloodaxe | £3,500 |
| 2011 | Alexandra Harris | Romantic Moderns | Thames and Hudson | £3,500 |
| 2011 | Adam O'Riordan | In the Flesh | Chatto Poetry | £3,500 |
| 2012 | No award given | No award given | No award given | No award given |
| 2013 | Ned Beauman | The Teleportation Accident | Sceptre | £2,500 |
| 2013 | Abi Curtis | The Glass Delusion | Salt | £2,500 |
| 2013 | Joe Stretch | The Adult | Cape | £2,500 |
| 2013 | Lucy Wood | Diving Belles | Bloomsbury | £2,500 |
| 2014 | Amy Sackville | Orkney | Granta | £2,000 |
| 2014 | Daisy Hildyard | Hunters in the Snow Glass Delusion | Cape | £4,000 |
| 2014 | Nadifa Mohamed | The Orchard of Lost Souls | Simon & Schuster | £4,000 |
| 2015 | Jonathan Beckman | How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette, the Stolen Diamonds and the Scandal that Shook the French Throne | John Murray | £2,500 |
| 2015 | Liz Berry | Black Country | Chatto & Windus | £2,500 |
| 2015 | Ben Brooks | Lolito | Canongate Books | £2,500 |
| 2015 | Zoe Pilger | Eat My Heart Out | Serpent’s Tail | £2,500 |
| 2016 | Jessie Greengrass | An Account Of The Decline Of The Great Auk, According To One Who Saw It | JM Originals | £2,500 |
| 2016 | Daisy Hay | Mr & Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance | Chatto & Windus | £2,500 |
| 2016 | Andrew McMillan | Physical | Cape Poetry | £2,500 |
| 2016 | Thomas Morris | We Don’t Know What We’re Doing | Faber and Faber | £2,500 |
| 2016 | Jack Underwood | Happiness | Faber and Faber | £2,500 |
| 2017 | Edmund Gordon | The Invention of Angela Carter | Vintage | £5,000 |
| 2017 | Melissa Lee-Houghton | Sunshine | Penned in the Margins | £5,000 |
| 2017 | Martin MacInnes | Infinite Ground | Atlantic Books | £5,000 |
| 2018 | Kayo Chingonyi | Kumukanda | Chatto Poetry | £5,250 |
| 2018 | Fiona Mozley | Elmet | JM Originals | £5,250 |
| 2018 | Miriam Nash | All the Prayers in the House | Bloodaxe | £5,250 |
| 2019 | Raymond Antrobus | The Perseverance | Penned in the Margins | £4,000 |
| 2019 | Damian Le Bas | The Stopping Places | Chatto & Windus | £4,000 |
| 2019 | Phoebe Power | Shrines of Upper Austria | Carcanet | £4,000 |
| 2019 | Nell Stevens | Mrs Gaskell and Me | Picador | £4,000 |

### 2020s

Somerset Maugham Award winners, 2020–present :
| Year | Author | Title | Publisher |
| 2020 | Oliver Soden | Michael Tippett: The Biography | Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Orion |
| 2020 | Roseanne Watt | Moder Dy | Birlinn/Polygon |
| 2020 | Alex Allison | The Art of the Body | Dialogue Books/Little, Brown & Co. |
| 2020 | Amrou Al-Kadhi | Unicorn | 4th Estate |
| 2021 | Lamorna Ash | Dark, Salt, Clear | Bloomsbury |
| 2021 | Isabelle Baafi | Ripe | Ignition Press |
| 2021 | Akeem Balogun | The Storm | Okapi Books |
| 2021 | Graeme Armstrong | The Young Team | Pan Macmillan/Picador |
| 2022 | Stephanie Sy-Quia | Amnion | Granta, Granta Poetry |
| 2022 | Tice Cin | Keeping the House | And Other Stories |
| 2022 | Lucia Osborne-Crowley | My Body Keeps Your Secrets | Indigo Press |
| 2022 | Caleb Azumah Nelson | Open Water | Penguin Random House/Viking Press |
| 2022 | Maia Elsner | Overrun by Wild Boars | Flipped Eye Publishing |
| 2023 | Travis Alabanza | None of the Above | Canongate |
| 2023 | Sussie Anie | To Fill a Yellow House | Phoenix Books |
| 2023 | Mya-Rose Craig | Birdgirl | Penguin |
| 2023 | Jay Gao | Imperium | Carcanet |
| 2023 | Gurnaik Johal | We Move | Profile |
| 2023 | Moses McKenzie | An Olive Grove in Ends | Wildfire |
| 2024 | Iona Lee | Anamesis | |
| 2024 | Momtaza Mehri | Bad Diaspora Poems | |
| 2024 | Katherine Pangonis | Twilight Cities | |
| 2024 | Cecile Pin | Wandering Souls | |
| 2024 | Phoenicia Rogerson | Herc | |