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One interesting new activity for
us is our annual prize for the best novel set in the South, inspired by the
books required by the South Carolina high school some young relatives attended.
They were assigned novels set in Iraq, Afghanistan, China, but had never read
To Kill a Mockingbird, an American classic.
We gave them Harper Lee's masterpiece, but they didn't
finish it. Their mother explained that they couldn't handle the "dialect." We
were horrified. Were they also skipping Mark Twain because they can't read
"dialect"? What else were they missing? And was it right that our schools were
not assigning our best novels, in order to focus on those set in other
countries? Were they also missing great twenty-first century books set in the
South?
We often read very good books set in the South. Why
shouldn't we celebrate some of the new books with a prize? We would fund it, and
we established a set of criteria, assembled a panel of judges, and defined the
prize: $2,500, a trip to New York, and the author would be the featured lecturer
at The Center for Fiction (the old Mercantile Library), the presenter of the
award. We also defined the South: the original eleven states of the
Confederacy-Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi,
Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas.
We named the prize after a famous writer, a University
of Texas fraternity brother of Dave's, Willie Morris, who got his start in
journalism as editor The Daily Texan, the school's newspaper. Willie went
on to become the youngest-ever editor of Harper's, and he wrote a series
of non-fiction books. Our prize was for fiction, but we felt comfortable using
Willie's name because his books read like fiction-in the best sense of those
words!
The spirit of the winning novel should reflect these
words of Willie's, "hope for belonging, for belief in a people's better nature,
for steadfastness against all that is hollow or crass or rootless or
destructive." It is chosen for the quality of its prose, originality, and
authenticity of setting and characters.
We advertise for submissions in
Publisher's Weekly and Oxford American, with a deadline of March 31
for the previous year. The winner is announced in these same publications, and
recent awards went to:
2008: The City of Refuge by Tom Piazza
2007: The King of Colored Town by Darryl Wimberley
Publishers, authors and
booksellers wishing to propose a candidate book are invited to send one copy to
Reba White Williams, 2 Dearfield Drive, Apartment 2A, Greenwich, CT 06831
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