The
Prize.

i. The Founding.

On the evening of the Ninth of November, 1980, a party of eleven convened at the Grolier Club, at 47 East 60th Street in New York, at the invitation of Katharine Whittemore, then the fiction editor of The Kenyon Review, and Yusuf Nightingale, a bookseller who kept a shop on Ninth Avenue and who had, three years earlier, refused to stock any book that had won a national prize unless he had first read it himself and found it worth the shelf.

They were joined by two librarians from the New York and Brooklyn Public Libraries, an editor from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a professor of American literature from Columbia, one from NYU, a translator from the German, and — arriving late, and by way of what was later described in her memoirs as "a small argument with the driver of a Checker cab" — the novelist Marion H. Deutsch, whose second novel had, in 1974, been overlooked by every prize of the season and who had, in an essay for The Nation, described the prize economy as "the auction house of American letters."

The evening ran from six to almost midnight. There was a printed menu of cold cuts and pears. Deutsch's opening remark, according to a note in Whittemore's diary, was: "If we do this, we do it because reading has become a business we can no longer trust to businessmen." The party adjourned at 11:47 having agreed on four points, which remain the four points of the awards to this day:

1. The prize would be given for a single book, not a career, and the winner would be selected only after the winning book had been read, in full, by every juror.
2. The prize would accept no submission fee it did not waive for first-time authors, translators, or small presses.
3. The prize would name its jurors publicly the day submissions opened, and would rotate the jury every year without exception.
4. The prize would announce a longlist, a shortlist, and a laureate — and would publish, alongside each, a written citation composed by the jury itself.

The first ceremony was held twelve months later, on the Ninth of November, 1981, at the Cooper Union Great Hall. Three categories were awarded — fiction, poetry, and nonfiction — before an audience of six hundred and forty-two. Toni Morrison, then between novels, delivered the keynote. The purse was three thousand dollars per laureate. Two categories — translated literature and letters to a young reader — were added in 1988 and 2004 respectively, following long deliberation and a private gift.

ii. The Purpose.

The Awards do not exist to sell books. Books already sell, or they don't; and the industry that determines which is not, on the whole, the same industry that produces the country's finest writing. The Awards exist to name the finest writing, and to say so plainly.

To this end, three principles govern every seasonal decision made by the foundation. They are neither novel nor complicated. They are, however, kept:

The book is the whole submission.

Jurors are not sent flap copy, reader's reports, marketing summaries, publisher correspondence, or lists of previous accolades. They are sent the book — the actual, physical book, in its trade edition, on the day it is available for sale. Books that arrive without their trade jacket are returned to the publisher, and re-sent. This is not fussy. It is the position of the foundation that a book is what a book looks like when a stranger picks it off a shelf.

The reader is never anonymous.

Every juror is named in public on the day of submission-open, and every citation is signed. A juror is expected to be prepared to defend, at any moment for the following twelve months, the choices of their panel. This is not comfortable, and it is not intended to be.

The citation is the prize.

A prize is a plaque, a purse, and a name on a page. It is quickly forgotten. What endures is what was said about the book — by writers, for writers, at length and in public. Every laureate receives, in perpetuity, a written citation of no fewer than two hundred words, composed by the jury and read aloud at the ceremony. These citations are the reason for everything else.

iii. The Process.

The process is public, and has been described by the foundation, in the interests of transparency, in the same fourteen pages since 1980. What follows is an abbreviated form. The full guidelines run to Section 14, paragraph 6 and are worth reading in whole.

A book is eligible if it was written by an American author (or an author who has resided in America for at least three consecutive years), if it was first published in the calendar year for which the prize is awarded, and if it exists in a first English-language edition of any print run, from any press, in any state of the union.

A book is submitted by its author, its agent, its publisher, its editor, its bookseller, its translator, or any reader in the United States, who may nominate one book per category per season. Nominations open the first Monday of January and close March 31 at midnight, Eastern time. The submission fee is $85 for houses of any commercial scale, $25 for independent presses of under a hundred titles per year, and $0 for authors submitting their own first books, for translators, and for any submission from a public library.

A book is read by five jurors on its category panel. Each juror reads every submission in full. Panels of five average two hundred and seventy books per season; three hundred and thirty-two hours of reading time; roughly forty-six thousand pages. Panels are compensated as scholars are compensated, at rates published on the foundation's public accounts.

A book is longlisted in October and shortlisted in November. The longlist is ten books. The shortlist is five. Both are announced without ceremony, on the website and by first-class mail to every finalist.

A book is chosen as laureate by the panel, in a single deliberation, on the evening before the ceremony. The panel is sequestered without staff. There is no chair's veto. The result is written by the panel over the course of a night, printed by the foundation the following morning, and read aloud that evening by the panel's chair. It is the last thing the panel ever does together.

iv. The Purse.

The prize is often described, imprecisely, as the country's largest literary purse. It is not — the Kluge, the Bollingen, and one or two others are larger — but it is the largest that is book-specific, and it is the only one that carries a subsidy for the finalists as well. The full breakdown, unchanged since the 2018 reforms:

Beyond the purse, every longlisted book is stocked in every branch of the eight founding library systems — from Brooklyn to Anchorage — for one full year, at the foundation's expense. Every laureate is presented, at the ceremony, with the physical seal: a hand-engraved medal cast each September in the Bowery, in a small foundry unchanged since it opened in 1919. It is heavy in the hand. It is the point.

v. The Original Eleven.

The party that met at the Grolier Club on the Ninth of November, 1980. Five are living, at time of writing. The foundation's board is drawn from their nominees, and includes, by tradition, one direct descendant of the founding evening. It has, since 1980, been chaired by exactly seven people.

vi. Notable Seasons.

A brief and incomplete chronology of the moments the awards have most been asked, since 1980, to explain.