Society of Authors' new Lowry award highlights return to in-person ceremony

The Society of Authors (SoA) will be presenting its new award in memory of Malcolm Lowry at its annual prize ceremony which returns as an in-person event for the first time in three years.

The Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize, created in memory of Malcolm Lowry and endowed by his biographer Bowker, recognises the author of a novel focusing on the experience of travel away from home. It is inspired by Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano (Penguin).

The award will be presented along with a raft of other prizes worth a total of £100,000 at a ceremony at Southwark Cathedral on 1st June. The ceremony will be livestreamed and BSL-interpreted. Anietie Isong, Roger Robinson and Caroline Brothers are among the judges. The others are Claire Fuller, Raymond Antrobus, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Joelle Taylor, Tahmima Anam, Denise Mina and Abir Mukherjee. 

Brothers said: "To read the submissions for the inaugural Volcano prize has been to embark on a kaleidoscopic journey into cultures, eras and experiences in an astonishing range of locations, refracted through a lens that is as broad as fiction itself. 

"Seeing how contemporary novelists have opened themselves to the wider world has been illuminating; how they grapple with the sense of self and otherness, with notions of displacement and adaptation, with the ways that personal, psychological or cultural heritage might shape experience or foster change, has been heady in its variety and depth. 

"There have been near misses and soaring heights, courageous debuts and confident works by writers of greater experience. It has been a pleasure to read them and it will be heartbreaking to choose among them in [search] of  a worthy successor to Lowry’s great work."

Other prizes awarded on the night will be the ALCS Tom Gallon Trust Award for a single short story, the Betty Trask Prize, presented for a first novel by a writer under 35, the McKitterick Prize for a first novel for a writer over 40 and the Queen’s Knickers Award for an original illustrated children’s book.