The Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize
In 1994, acting on the suggestion of its President, Janice Carlisle, The International Society for the Study of Narrative established an award that "honors the many past and continuing contributions of Barbara Perkins and George Perkins to the development and success of the Society, including the founding of both The Journal of Narrative Technique and the Society itself. The award, presented annually to the book that makes the most significant contribution to the study of narrative," offers a prize of $1000 plus a contribution of $500 toward expenses for the winning author to attend the Narrative Conference where the award will be presented. The first Perkins Award was announced at the MLA meeting in Chicago in December, 1995, and presented at the Tenth Anniversary Conference at Ohio State University in April 1996.
The Perkins Prize is conceived as a book prize rather than an author prize. Thus all books on the topic of narrative, whether edited collections, collaboratively written books, or monographs, are eligible to compete. If an edited collection or collaboratively written book is selected, the prize goes to the editor(s) or the collaborators. Publisher, third-party, and self-nominations are appropriate.
The deadline for submissions each year is June 1. Books published during the previous calendar year are eligible. In the following year the winner will be announced at the MLA Convention and the prize will be awarded at the Narrative Conference the following year.
The latest call for nominations can be found at our blog:
Call for Nominations: Perkins Prize
Current Prize Winner
2021
Yogita Goyal, Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery, New York: New York University Press, 2019
Past Prize Winners
(listed by the year of the award, two years after the year of publication)
2020
Ruth Page, Narratives Online: Shared Stories on Social Media, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018
2019
Rita Charon et al., The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Honorable Mention: Christopher González, Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2017).
2018
Kent Puckett, Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2016).
2017
Erin James, The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).
Honorable Mention: Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (eds.), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015).
2016
Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P 2014).
Honorable Mention: Marco Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (2014).
2015
Thomas Pavel, University of Chicago, The Lives of the Novel: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2013)
Honorable Mention: Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (de Gruyter, 2013)
2014
Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2012).
2013
Edward Adams, Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill (Charlotte, VA: U of Virginia P, 2011).
Honorable Mention: Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011).
2012
Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010).
Honorable Mention: Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010).
2011
Garrett Stewart, Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction (Chicago: U of chicago Press, 2009).
Honorable Mention: Jennifer Wenzel, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago: U of chicago Press, 2009).
2010
Hilary Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (University of Nebraska Press).
2009
Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton UP, 2007).
2008
Brian Richardson, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2006).
2007
James Phelan, Living To Tell About It: A Rhetoric And Ethics Of Character Narration (Cornell UP, 2005).
Honorable Mention
A.C. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity (Oxford, 2005).
2006
Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Duke University Press, 2004).
Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
2005
Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (University Press of Virginia, 2003).
2004
David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002)
Jorgen Dines Johansen, Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).
2003
Amy Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)
Michael Whitmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford University Press, 2001)
2002
Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Honorable Mention
Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)
2001
Robert L.Caserio, The Novel in England, 1900-1950: History and Theory (Twayne Publishers, 1999)
Eileen Gillooly, Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
2000
Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)
Dorothy J. Hale, Social formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present (Stanford University Press, 1998)
Honorable Mentions
Kali Israel, Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1998)
Elizabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998)
Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998
1999
Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997)
1998
Judith Roof, Come As You Are (Columbia University Press, 1996)
Monika Fludernik, Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (Routledge, 1996)
1997
Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Harvard University Press, 1995)
1996
Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (Oxford University Press, 1994)