The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize

This is an annual award of £10,000 for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place, which is awarded by The Royal Society of Literature, founded by King George IV in 1820, to ‘reward literary merit and excite literary talent’.

The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize: official web site

The shortlist was recently announced:

Madeleine Bunting: The Plot (Granta)
William Fiennes: The Music Room (Picador)
Daniyal Mueenuddin: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Bloomsbury)
Kachi A. Ozumba: The Shadow of a Smile (Alma Books)
Iain Sinclair: Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (Hamish Hamilton)
Ian Thomson: The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (Faber)

The winner will be announced on May 24th. An article about the award appears in today's Guardian:

Ondaatje prize shortlist wanders from Pakistan to Hackney

Ian Thomson is the winner of this year's Ondaatje Prize for his book The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica, a look at the 'gritty underbelly of "corrupted Eden"':

Ian Thomson wins £10,000 Ondaatje prize

The shortlist for this year's prize has been announced:

To the River by Olivia Laing (Canongate)
Thin Paths by Julia Blackburn (Cape)
Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (Cape)
The Sly Company of People who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya (Picador)
Open City by Teju Cole (Faber)
Connemara by Tim Robinson (Penguin Ireland)

The winner will be announced on May 28.

BTW, last year's winner was The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal.

This year's winner is Rahul Bhattacharya, for his novel The Sly Company of People who Care.

RAHUL BHATTACHARYA WINS the £10,000 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize

The shortlist for the 2013 Royal Society for Literature's Ondaatje Prize has been announced:

Liam Carson, Call Mother a Lonely Field
Patrick Flanery, Absolution
Gavin Francis, Empire Antarctica
Philip Hensher, Scenes from Early Life
Sarah Moss, Names for the Sea
Zadie Smith, NW

The winning book will be announced on May 13th. More info:

http://rslit.org/rsl-ondaatje-prize

This Boy: A Memoir of Childhood by Alan Johnson was chosen as the winner of this year's prize. These other books were chosen for the shortlist:

Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man’s Garden
Patrick Barkham, Badgerlands
Mark Dapin, Spirit House
Tim Dee, Four Fields
Esther Woolfson, Field Notes From a Hidden City

I was pleased to learn that Scenes from Early Life by Philip Hensher was chosen as the 2013 winner, as I loved that book.

Ondaatje Prize 2015: shortlist announced

Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood by Justin Marozzi , a history of rulers and conquerors, slaves and soldiers, and Capital: a Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi by Rana Dasgupta, which gives voice to the winners and losers in a globalised India, are among six books in contention for the prize, which is now in its 12th year. Another non-fiction title, Everything Is Wonderful by Sigrid Rausing , recounts a year she spent completing anthropological fieldwork in the 1990s on a collapsing post-Soviet collective farm in Estonia. The shortlist is completed by three novels: The Lie by Helen Dunmore , about a soldier whose return to Cornwall from the First World War is haunted by memories of the trenches; What Was Promised by Tobias Hill, a multi-generational story of three families brought to the East End of London by the Second World War; and The Architect's Apprentice by the Turkish writer Elif Shafak, which is an intricate tale of a boy and his elephant, set in 16th-century Istanbul.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookprizes/11573536/Ondaatje-Prize-2015...

From The Telegraph

Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood by Justin Marozzi won this year's Ondaatje Prize

RSL Ondaatje Prize 2016 winner announced

We are delighted to announce the winner of the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2016 is Peter Pomerantsev with Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.

Other books on the shortlist were:

Jane Clarke The River
Brian Dillon The Great Explosion
Alexandra Harris Weatherland
James Rebanks The Shepherd’s Life
Samanth Subramanian This Divided Island

The RSL Ondaatje Prize 2017 was awarded to Francis Spufford for Golden Hill.

The other books shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2017:
•Amy Liptrot The Outrun
•Rebecca Mackenzie In a Land of Paper Gods
•Kei Miller Augustown
•Barney Norris Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain
•Rose Tremain The Gustav Sonata