We can't afford to lose the John Llewellyn Rhys prize

Free from the backbiting of the Booker, this award is one that makes a real difference to writers beginning their careers

Margaret Drabble, The Guardian, 29 June, 2011

Margaret Drabble in 1966, the year she won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize. Photograph: Guardian

The John Llewellyn Rhys prize is one of the most romantic and distinguished of prizes and its disappearance would be a great loss to hopeful authors and the literary world. Booktrust, which sponsors and administers the prize, and which has suffered severe funding cuts, says it must go. This would be very sad. The prize is awarded to young writers under the age of 35, at the outset of their careers, when a sign of approval means much more than it does in their cynical, competitive, commercial later years. I've often argued that the Booker, although originally well-intentioned, now distorts the market and creates immense spite and ill will, egged on by a malicious press, and enraging novelists and publishers who should be old and wise enough to know better. The John Llewellyn Rhys has no such bad side effects. It comes from the clear blue sky, often completely unexpected, and it brings hope, encouragement, and a little much needed money.


It was created not to increase sales or to enrage losers but to commemorate a writer who died tragically young, killed in action with the RAF in 1940. Rhys was the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry of Britain, and a young pilot like the hero of Yeats's famous poem "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death". Whether Rhys foresaw his own end we do not know, but he loved flying and was passionate about his life in the skies. He published three books and was posthumously awarded the Hawthornden prize, but this success came too late for him to know of it, and his widow determined that other writers should be rewarded young and in his name. The prize has since been supported by other sponsors, and as yet his name lives on.


Read Drabble's full piece at The Guardian.