Richard Flanagan follows a long tradition of knocking back awards

When Richard Flanagan turned down the £50,000 (around $97,000) prize money for the Baillie Gifford Prize this month, he joined a distinguished line-up of literary award refusals.

Flanagan, who won the 2025 nonfiction award for his book Question 7, took a stand for the environment. He said in his acceptance speech that he would not accept the prize money until the fund-manager sponsor shares a plan to reduce its investment in fossil fuel extraction and increase investments in renewables.

Richard Flanagan is just the latest in a long line of authors turning down prize money.Credit: Adam Gibson

Baillie Gifford has already been boycotted because of its investments in fossil fuels and companies linked to Israel. A campaign by Fossil Free Books has ended the company’s partnership with nine British literary festivals. (Baillie Gifford says the allegation that it has significant amounts of money in occupied Palestinian territories is “offensively misleading” and also that it is not a “significant fossil fuel investor”).

There have been similar protests against the sponsorship of Canada’s Giller Prize, awarded this year to Anne Michaels for her novel Held. More than 20 authors withdrew their books from consideration and 300 said they would not submit work until lead sponsor Scotiabank stopped its investment in an Israeli defence contractor.

Today’s flashpoints are fossil fuels and Israel, but writers have long been refusing prizes on one sticking point or another. Jean-Paul Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 because he didn’t want to turn himself into an “institution”. Since then, there’s been a Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal, which has never been refused. (Sartre did try to get the Nobel money back some years later when he was running low on funds.)

Patrick White had a policy of not accepting awards.Credit: Staff photographer

Other notable refusals include Ursula K. Le Guin, who knocked back the 1977 Nebula Award in protest at the Science Fiction Writers of America taking away Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s honorary membership; Joseph Andras, who rejected France’s Goncourt Prize for a first novel in 2016 because his “conception of literature is incompatible with the idea of a competition”; Hari Kunzru, who turned down the 2003 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize because he said its sponsor, the Mail on Sunday, was “anti-migrant”; and Javier Marias, who refused Spain’s National Narrative Award in 2012 because he wanted nothing from any government.

Patrick White had a policy of not accepting awards, but made an exception for the Nobel Prize in 1973. He used the money to establish the Patrick White Award for distinguished older Australians whose writing has not received adequate recognition.

Donating to a social cause can be another more subtle protest against the literature prize machine. Flanagan donated the $40,000 Prime Minister’s Literary Award given to him in 2014 for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. Tim Winton donated the money from two prizes ($25,000 from the 2001 WA Premier’s Prize and $15,000 from the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature) to his Protect Ningaloo campaign to save the World Heritage-listed site.

In 2013, when Carrie Tiffany won the inaugural Stella Prize, she shared $10,000 of her prize money with the shortlisted authors, which encouraged other winners to donate to pet causes. But Charlotte Wood broke with that tradition in 2016, when she won with her novel The Natural Way of Things. She kept the money “not just because it will afford me the only thing every writer really wants, time and mental space to work, but because I want to stake a claim for literature as an essential social benefit, in and of itself”.

So accepting prize money can also be a principled stand, for writers and for literature. You can take the cash and still keep your integrity.

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