The WH Smith Literary Award was an award founded in 1959 by British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 high street retailer W H Smith

W H Smith

WHSmith plc is a British retailer, headquartered in Swindon, Wiltshire, England. It is best known for its chain of high street, railway station, airport, hospital and motorway service station shops selling books, stationery, magazines, newspapers, and entertainment products...

. Its founding aim was stated to be to "encourage and bring international esteem to authors of the British Commonwealth"; originally open to all residents of the UK

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, the Commonwealth

Commonwealth of Nations

The Commonwealth of Nations, normally referred to as the Commonwealth and formerly known as the British Commonwealth, is an intergovernmental organisation of fifty-four independent member states...

 and the Republic of Ireland

Republic of Ireland

Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...

, it latterly admitted foreign works in translation and works by US

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 authors. The final three winners were Americans (Philip Roth

Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...

, Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt is an American writer and author of the novels The Secret History and The Little Friend . She won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003.-Early life:...

 and Richard Powers

Richard Powers

Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology.- Life and work :...

), and 2005 was the award's final year.

Previous winners

1959 Patrick White

Patrick White

Patrick Victor Martindale White , an Australian author, is widely regarded as an important English-language novelist of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, he published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays.White's fiction employs humour, florid prose, shifting narrative...

, Voss

Voss (novel)

Voss is the fifth published novel of Patrick White. It is based upon the life of the nineteenth-century Prussian explorer and naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt who disappeared whilst on an expedition into the Australian outback.-Plot summary:...

1960 Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee

Laurence Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter, raised in the village of Slad, and went to Marling School, Gloucestershire. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie , As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and...

, Cider With Rosie

Cider with Rosie

Cider with Rosie is a 1959 book by Laurie Lee . It is the first book of a trilogy that continues with As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War...

1961 Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer is a South African writer and political activist. She was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature when she was recognised as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".Her writing has long dealt...

, Friday's Footprint

1962 J. R. Ackerley

J. R. Ackerley

J. R. Ackerley was arts editor of The Listener, the weekly magazine of the BBC...

, We Think the World of You

1963 Gabriel Fielding

Gabriel Fielding

Gabriel Fielding , pen name of Alan Gabriel Barnsley, was a British novelist whose works include: In the Time of Greenbloom, The Birthday King, Through Streets Broad and Narrow and The Women of Guinea Lane.-Biography:Fielding's father, George, was an Anglican vicar at Hexham...

, The Birthday King

1964 Ernst H. Gombrich

Ernst Gombrich

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE was an Austrian-born art historian who became naturalized British citizen in 1947. He spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom...

, Meditations on a Hobby-Horse

1965 Leonard Woolf

Leonard Woolf

Leonard Sidney Woolf was an English political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant, and husband of author Virginia Woolf.-Early life:...

, Beginning Again

1966 R. C. Hutchinson

R. C. Hutchinson

Ray Coryton Hutchinson was a best-selling British novelist. His 1975 novel Rising was short-listed for the Booker Prize....

, A Child Possessed

1967 Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys , born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, was a mid 20th-century novelist from Dominica. Educated from the age of 16 in Great Britain, she is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea , written as a "prequel" to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.-Early life:Rhys was born in Roseau, Dominica...

, Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 postcolonial parallel novel by Dominica-born author Jean Rhys. Since her previous work, Good Morning, Midnight, was published in 1939, Rhys had lived in obscurity. Wide Sargasso Sea put Rhys into the limelight once more, and became her most successful novel.The novel...

1968 V. S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad "V. S." Naipaul, TC is a Nobel prize-winning Indo-Trinidadian-British writer who is known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empire's colonialism...

, The Mimic Men

1969 Robert Gittings

Robert Gittings

Robert William Victor Gittings CBE , was an English writer, biographer, BBC Radio producer, playwright and minor poet...

, John Keats

1970 John Fowles

John Fowles

John Robert Fowles was an English novelist and essayist. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Fowles among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".-Birth and family:...

, The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant’s Woman , by John Fowles, is a period novel inspired by the 1823 novel Ourika, by Claire de Duras, which Fowles translated into English in 1977...

1971 Nan Fairbrother

Nan Fairbrother

Nan Fairbrother was an English writer and lecturer on landscape and land use. She was a Member of the UK Institute of Landscape Architects, now the Landscape Institute. Her brother was also a landscape architect. Fairbrother was born in Coventry, England, and attended the University of London,...

, New Lives, New Landscapes

1972 Kathleen Raine

Kathleen Raine

Kathleen Jessie Raine was a British poet, critic, and scholar writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founder member of the Temenos Academy.-Life:Raine was...

, The Lost Country

1973 Brian Moore

Brian Moore (novelist)

Brian Moore was a Northern Irish novelist and screenwriter who emigrated to Canada and later lived in the United States. He was acclaimed for the descriptions in his novels of life in Northern Ireland after the Second World War, in particular his explorations of the inter-communal divisions of The...

, Catholics

Catholics (novel)

Catholics is a novel by Northern Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore. It was first published in 1972, and was republished with an introduction by Robert Ellsberg and a series of study questions by Loyola Press in 2006....

1974 Anthony Powell

Anthony Powell

Anthony Dymoke Powell CH, CBE was an English novelist best known for his twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975....

, Temporary Kings

Temporary Kings

Temporary Kings is a novel by Anthony Powell, the penultimate in his twelve-volume masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time. It was published in 1973 and remains in print as does the rest of the sequence....

1975 Jon Stallworthy

Jon Stallworthy

Jon Stallworthy FBA FRSL is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oxford. He is also a Fellow and Acting President of Wolfson College, a poet, and literary critic....

, Wilfred Owen

1976 Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...

, North

1977 Ronald Lewin

Ronald Lewin

Ronald Lewin , full name George Ronald Lewin, was a British military historian, radio producer and publishing editor.He was educated at Heath School, Halifax and Oxford University where he was a Hastings Scholar and Goldsmiths’ Exhibitioner....

, Slim: The Standardbearer

1978 Patrick Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Sir Patrick "Paddy" Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE was a British author, scholar and soldier, who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during World War II. He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer", with books including his classic A Time of...

, A Time of Gifts

A Time Of Gifts

A Time of Gifts is regarded by many critics as one of the classics of travel literature. Written by Patrick Leigh Fermor and published by John Murray in 1977 when the author was 62, it is an account of the first part of the author's journey on foot across Europe from the Hook of Holland to...

1979 Mark Girouard

Mark Girouard

Dr Mark Girouard MA, PhD, DipArch, FSA is a British architectural writer, an authority on the country house, leading architectural historian, and biographer of James Stirling.- Family life :...

, Life in the English Country House

1980 Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn, born Thomson William Gunn , was an Anglo-American poet who was praised both for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style...

, Selected Poems 1959-1975

1981 Isabel Colegate

Isabel Colegate

Isabel Diana Colegate is a British author and literary agent.She was born in Lincolnshire, the daughter of Sir Arthur and Winifred Mary Colegate, and was educated at Runton Hill School...

, The Shooting Party

1982 George Clare

George Clare (writer)

George Clare was a British Jewish author and Holocaust survivor who wrote Last Waltz in Vienna and Berlin Days. Both are autobiographies in which he recounts first in Last Waltz in Vienna his boyhood and life as a Jew in Vienna, and then subsequently goes on to describe Hitler's rise to power and...

, Last Waltz in Vienna

Last Waltz in Vienna

Last Waltz in Vienna by George Clare was the 1982 winner of The WH Smith Literary Award.The book, subtitled The Destruction of a Family 1842-1942, tells the history and fate of the Klaar family, who were proudly Austrian and also happened to be Jewish.The family left Austria following the Anschluss...

1983 A. N. Wilson

A. N. Wilson

Andrew Norman Wilson is an English writer and newspaper columnist, known for his critical biographies, novels, works of popular history and religious views...

, Wise Virgin

1984 Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin

Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...

, Required Writing

1985 David Hughes

David Hughes

David Hughes may refer to:*David Hughes , interim president and CEO of Amtrak, 2005–2006*David Hughes , English astronomer specialising in comets*David Hughes , Swedish bass guitarist...

, The Pork Butcher

The Pork Butcher

The Pork Butcher is a novel by English writer David Hughes, first published in 1984 by Constable & Co, and winner of the 1985 WH Smith Literary Award.-Outline:...

1986 Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing

Doris May Lessing CH is a British writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos....

, The Good Terrorist

The Good Terrorist

The Good Terrorist is a 1985 novel by Doris Lessing. The story examines the events in the life of a well-intentioned squatter, Alice, who is drawn into organizing acts of violence.-Main characters:...

1987 Elizabeth Jennings

Elizabeth Jennings

Elizabeth Jennings was an English poet.-Life and career:Jennings was born in Boston, Lincolnshire. When she was six, her family moved to Oxford, where she remained for the rest of her life. Couzyn, Jeni Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, pp. 98-100. There she later attended St Anne's College...

, Collected Poems 1953-1985

1988 Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes (critic)

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO is an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970.-Early life:...

, The Fatal Shore

The Fatal Shore

The Fatal Shore. The epic of Australia's founding, by Robert Hughes, published 1987 by Harvill Press, is a historical account of the United Kingdom's settlement of Australia as a penal colony with convicts. The book details the period 1770 onwards through white settlement to the 1840s, when...

1989 Christopher Hill

Christopher Hill

Christopher Hill may refer to:*Christopher Hill , English bishop*Christopher J. Hill, International Relations scholar, Professor and Director of the Cambridge Centre of International Studies*Christopher R. Hill, U.S. Ambassador in Iraq...

, A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church

1990 V. S. Pritchett

V. S. Pritchett

Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett CH CBE , was a British writer and critic. He was particularly known for his short stories, collected in a number of volumes...

, A Careless Widow and Other Stories

1991 Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott

Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC is a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2011 for White Egrets. His works include the Homeric epic Omeros...

, Omeros

Omeros

Omeros is a 1990 epic poem by Nobel Prize-winning author Derek Walcott. Many consider it his finest work.-Overview:The epic is set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Although its name is Omeros it has just a minor touch of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.The narrative of Omeros is multilayered...

1992 Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa 

1993 Michèle Roberts

Michèle Roberts

Michèle Brigitte Roberts is a British writer, novelist and poet. Roberts was the daughter of a French Catholic teacher mother and English Protestant father ; she has dual UK-France nationality.-Early life:She was raised in Edgware, Middlesex and educated at a convent, expecting to become a nun,...

, Daughters of the House

1994 Vikram Seth

Vikram Seth

Vikram Seth is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist.-Early life:Vikram Seth was born on 20 June 1952 to Leila and Prem Seth in Calcutta...

, A Suitable Boy

1995 Alice Munro

Alice Munro

Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short-story writer, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, and a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize...

, Open Secrets

Open Secrets

Open Secrets is a book of short stories by Alice Munro published by McClelland and Stewart in 1994. It was nominated for the 1994 Governor General's Award for English Fiction.-Stories:* "Carried Away"* "A Real Life"...

1996 Simon Schama

Simon Schama

Simon Michael Schama, CBE is a British historian and art historian. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain...

, Landscape and Memory

1997 Orlando Figes

Orlando Figes

Orlando Figes is a British historian of Russia, and Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London.-Overview:Figes is the son of the feminist writer Eva Figes. His sister is the author and editor Kate Figes. He attended William Ellis School in north London from 1971-78...

, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution - 1891-1924

A People's Tragedy

A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 is an award-winning book written by British historian Orlando Figes. First published in 1996, it chronicles Russian history from the Famine of 1891-1892, the response to which, Figes argues, severely weakened the Russian Empire, to the death of...

1998 Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes

Edward James Hughes OM , more commonly known as Ted Hughes, was an English poet and children's writer. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until...

, Tales From Ovid

Tales from Ovid

Tales from Ovid is a poetical work written by the English poet Ted Hughes. Published in 1997 by Faber and Faber, it is a retelling of twenty-four tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses. It won the Whitbread Book Of The Year Award for 1997 and has been translated into several languages. It was one of his...

 

1999 Beryl Bainbridge

Beryl Bainbridge

Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge, DBE was an English author from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her psychological novels, often set amongst the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker...

, Master Georgie

Master Georgie

Master Georgie is a 1998 historical novel by English novelist Beryl Bainbridge. It deals with the British experience of the Crimean War through the adventures of the eponymous central character George Hardy, who volunteers to work on the battlefields....

2000 Melvyn Bragg

Melvyn Bragg

Melvyn Bragg, Baron Bragg FRSL FRTS FBA, FRS FRSA is an English broadcaster and author best known for his work with the BBC and for presenting the The South Bank Show...

, The Soldier's Return

The Soldier's Return

-Plot summary:Sam Richardson returns to the small Cumbrian town of Wigton after fighting in Burma during the Second World War. The war has given Sam’s wife Ellen a newfound confidence and Sam is a stranger to his son Joe...

2001 Philip Roth

Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...

, The Human Stain

The Human Stain

The Human Stain is a novel by Philip Roth. It is set in late 1990s rural New England. Its first person narrator is 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, a character in previous Roth novels, including American Pastoral and I Married a Communist ; these two books form a loose trilogy with The Human...

2002 Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan

Ian Russell McEwan CBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist and screenwriter, and one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. In 2008, The Times named him among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"....

, Atonement

Atonement (novel)

Atonement is a 2001 novel by British author Ian McEwan.On a fateful day, a young girl makes a terrible mistake that has life-changing effects for many people...

2003 Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt is an American writer and author of the novels The Secret History and The Little Friend . She won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003.-Early life:...

, The Little Friend

The Little Friend

The Little Friend is the second novel by Donna Tartt, published in 2002, a decade after her first novel, The Secret History.-Novel:Superficially, The Little Friend is a mystery adventure, centered on a young girl, Harriet, living in Mississippi in the early 1970s and her implicit anxieties about...

2004 Richard Powers

Richard Powers

Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology.- Life and work :...

, The Time of Our Singing

The Time of Our Singing

The Time of Our Singing is a novel by American writer Richard Powers. It tells the story of two brothers involved in music, dealing heavily with issues of prejudice....

2005 Philip Roth

Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...

, The Plot Against America

The Plot Against America

The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternate history in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh.-Plot introduction:...

WH Smith Mind-Boggling Book Award

For a few years, W H Smith also offered a children's book award. The judges were children between nine and twelve, and the intention was to promote books which were "accessible to children in content and price, as well as offering a gripping read."

The winners were:

1993 Philip Ridley

Philip Ridley

Philip Ridley is a British artist working with various media.- Biography :Ridley was born in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London, where he still lives and works. He studied painting at St. Martin’s School of Art and his work has been exhibited throughout Europe and Japan...

, Kindlekrax

1994 Malorie Blackman

Malorie Blackman

Malorie Blackman OBE is an author of literature and television drama for children and young adults. She has used science fiction to explore social and ethical issues. Her critically and popularly acclaimed Noughts & Crosses series uses the setting of a fictional dystopia to explore racism...

, Hacker

1995 Maggie Prince, Memoirs of a Dangerous Alien

1996 Sharon Creech

Sharon Creech

Sharon Creech is an American novelist of children's fiction.-Biography:Sharon Creech was born in South Euclid, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, where she grew up with her parents , one sister , and three brothers...

, Walk Two Moons

Walk Two Moons

Walk Two Moons is a novel written by Sharon Creech and published in 1994. It won the 1995 Newbery Medal. It was originally intended as a follow-up to Creech's previous novel Absolutely Normal Chaos, however, the idea was changed after Creech began writing.-Plot summary:The novel is narrated by a 13...