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 2023 Prize is now closed for submissions. The shortlist will be announced in Spring 2023.
The 2022 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize winner
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)
With thanks, the judges of the 2023 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.
https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/aamer-hussein/
Zeba Talkhani
Zeba Talkhani was born in Sirsi, South India and grew up in Saudi Arabia’s expatriate community before moving to India, Germany, and ultimately the UK, where she works in publishing. Her memoir My Past is a Foreign Country charts this journey and explores themes such as patriarchy, mother-daughter relationships and self-compassion. It’s received praise in The Times, British Vogue, Stylist Magazine, The Scotsman and even by Hillary Clinton. She recently published The Most Exciting Eid, her first children’s book.
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.
Prize logo illustration © Annabelle Carvell