Townsend Prize for Fiction

Every other year a board of judges awards the Townsend Prize for Fiction to an outstanding novel or short-story collection written and published during the previous two years while the author lived in Georgia. The award is named for Jim Townsend, the founding editor of Atlanta magazine, the associate editor of Atlanta Weekly Magazine (of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution), and an early mentor to such Atlanta writers as Pat Conroy, Terry Kay, William Diehl, and Anne Rivers Siddons.

The Prize was conceived by a group of Atlanta writers in 1981. From 1981 to 1997 Georgia State University sponsored the award. In 1997 Georgia Perimeter College (later Georgia State University Perimeter College) and the Chattahoochee Review assumed sponsorship. In 2000 the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum (part of the Atlanta History Center) and Atlanta magazine became additional sponsors. By 2012 the award was cosponsored by the Southern Academy for Literary Arts and Scholarly Research at Georgia Perimeter, the Chattahoochee Review, and the Georgia Center for the Book.

In 2021 stewardship of the prize passed to the Atlanta Writers Club (AWC). Now a 1,400-member community of writers, the AWC was founded in 1914 as a social and educational organization to teach the craft and business of writing, support local writers, and advance the cause of literature and literacy in the South. In the spring of 2023, the Georgia Writers Museum in Eatonton, repository of the legacy of Georgia’s most accomplished writers and a hub for the promotion of the literary arts, joined the AWC as an administrative partner.

A reading committee composed of members of the Georgia literary community considers all eligible books and determines a list of ten finalists. On the occasion of the award’s presentation to Ha Jin in 2002, Chattahoochee Review editor Lawrence Hetrick explained that the prize is intended to recognize two accomplishments by a writer: “First, we’re looking for excellence and originality in language. Second, we’re looking for human insight.” This emphasis on excellence and insight remains at the center of the assessment of the nominees.

The ten finalists are then passed to three out-of-state judges to determine the short list and the prize winner. The Townsend Prize consists of a monetary award and a commemorative trophy, which are presented to the winner at a ceremony every other year. The ceremony is intended to honor the Townsend Prize recipient, recognize the accomplishments of the other nine finalists, and celebrate the rich literary history of the state of Georgia.

The prize has served an important role in encouraging and promoting Georgia writers. Katherine Stockett, winner of the 2010 Prize for her debut novel The Help, which went on to become a major motion picture in 2011, speaks of her experience as “an amazing honor for a first-time novelist… it really is exactly the kind of support that the writers in the state of Georgia and Atlanta especially need.” Julia Franks, 2018 winner for Over the Plain Houses, published her novel through a boutique literary press and notes the Townsend provides publicity that these small presses cannot. “The Townsend,” she says, “and other prizes like it mean everything to us… Awards like the Townsend can and do act as great equalizers, a vehicle that gives the rest of us a shot.”

The list of Townsend Prize winners reflects a diverse literary community, ranging from internationally known writers Alice Walker and Ha Jin to locally cherished authors Celestine Sibley and Ferrol Sams to established regional writers Pam Durban, Judson Mitcham, and James Kilgo. The most unexpected name on the list may be Ha Jin, who moved to the United States from mainland China in 1985 and taught with the Emory University creative writing faculty for ten years before moving north to teach at Boston University in 2002. Jin’s presence on the Townsend Prize list signifies the increasingly international character of Georgia’s literary landscape. The intervening two decades have witnessed only an expansion in the diversity of the community of writers and readers in Georgia since Jin’s recognition.

Winners of the Townsend Prize