The Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer's Award
The Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award grants £20,000 annually to two writers for a yet-to-be-published book relating to the Americas. Applicants are expected to make extensive use of the British Library’s Americas collections. Writer’s Award 2025 goes to Peter Brathwaite and Joseph Zárate
Authors Peter Brathwaite and Joseph Zárate have been named as the 2025 winners of the Eccles Institute and Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award, in a reception at the British Library on Wednesday 4 December.
Brathwaite and Zárate are each awarded £20,000 and up to a year’s writing residency at the British Library to develop their forthcoming books using the Library’s Americas collections, as well as the opportunity to showcase their finished work at Hay Festival Global events in the UK and Latin America.
They were selected from a seven-strong shortlist of writers hailing from Europe, the Caribbean, North and South America. Including both fiction and non-fiction, the 2025 shortlist included memoir, history, biography, fiction and, for the first time, a narrative cookery book.
Submissions for the 2026 Writer’s Award will open next summer.
About the winners
Peter Brathwaite
Award winning British Barbadian opera singer Peter Brathwaite FRSA works across different art forms to excavate and platform the stories of suppressed voices. He has written for The Guardian and The Independent, and he is a prominent speaker on performance, identity, and restorative justice in the arts. His is book, Rediscovering Black Portraiture, was published in 2023.
His submitted work for the Award is Not All of Me Will Die, a non-fiction exploration of identity, history and memory, through the lens of his Barbadian and British heritage.
The Judges said:
Peter’s project promises to uncover hidden collections and connections about Barbados in new and exciting ways. We were drawn what is a deeply personal but also expansive project about the legacies of the Caribbean and British encounter.
Joseph Zárate
Born in Lima, Peru, Joseph Zárate is an award-winning journalist, writer and editor. He is the author of the non-fiction books Guerras del interior and Algo nuestro sobre la tierra. He has served as deputy editor of the magazines Etiqueta Negra and Etiqueta Verde and was awarded a 2018 Ochberg Fellowship by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma of the School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York.
His award submission, Todo nace en el agua y muere en ella, takes inspiration from Zarate’s 90-day journey on foot and boat following the same route of Spanish conquistador, Francisco de Orellan, five centuries ago when he set out to ‘discover’ the Amazon River. It will be the first account of the Amazon River, its communities, cities and history written by a Latin American with Amazonian indigenous roots.
The Judges said:
Drawing from his indigenous heritage and from more than 300 interviews with people who live along the Amazon, Joseph’s project will create a new account of the river and region. We cannot wait to see how Library collections will support and feed into a book which is as interesting as it is urgent.
The Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer's Award is a highly prestigious annual literary award of £20,000 for a current writing project exploring the Americas.
The award facilitates and inspires world-class storytelling in the UK and across the Americas, supporting writers in the creative stage of a new fiction or non-fiction project. The prize grants a year-long residency at the British Library and access to curatorial expertise within the Library’s world class Americas collections.
The Writer’s Award is celebrated globally through a dynamic series of events profiling winners at Hay Festival editions in Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Wales, as awardees join forces with other celebrated writers and thinkers to explore themes central to the Library’s Americas collections, championing new perspectives to audiences in the UK and Latin America.
What's the prize?
Two winners will hold the Writer’s Award for one year from 1 January 2025, and will receive:
£20,000, in four quarterly grants
Unique access to the expertise of the British Library’s curatorial staff
The chance to appear at future Hay Festival Global editions with their published work.
The winners will also have the opportunity to work with the Eccles Institute to develop and facilitate activities and events related to their research at the British Library.
They’ll be in good company. Previous winners include...
2024
Hannah Lowe and Alia Trabucco Zerán are the current Writer’s Award holders. Lowe won for a lyrical, hybrid memoir, Moy: In Search of Nelsa Lowe, where she uses the intimate story of her Chinese Jamaican aunt as a device for exploring the history of the Chinese in Jamaica. Trabucco Zerán won for Impudence ('Descaro'), where she weaves fiction with memoir and essay to explore portrayals of Latin American women and our relationship with the female face, identity and loss.
2023
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo won for Dark Eye Place which tells the story of a family house, passed down to the daughter of each generation. Jarred McGinnis won for The Mountain Weight, which mines his family’s history, from the American Civil War to the present day, to examine themes of masculinity, family and migration.
2022
Philip Clark won for Sound and the City, a history of the sound of New York City and an investigation into what makes New York sound like New York. Javier Montes won for Trópico de Londres (Tropic of London), telling the story of Latin American artists, writers and intellectual exiles in London during the second half of the 20th century.
2021
Pola Oloixarac won for Atlas Literario del Amazonas (Literary Atlas of the Amazon) – a work of creative non-fiction revealing the secret history of the Amazon. Imaobong Umoren won for Empire Without End: A New History of Britain and the Caribbean – an expansive new history of the 400 year relationship between Britain and the Caribbean.
2020
Novelist and writer Chloe Aridjis for her novel Reports from the Land of the Bats and writer and editor Daniel Saldaña París for his novel Principio de mediocridad.
2019
Writer Rachel Hewitt and novelist Sara Taylor. Hewitt is a Lecturer in Creative Writing, and author, Sara Taylor is a novelist as well as co-director and editor of creative-critical publisher Seam Editions.
Portrait of the award winners by Clara Molden.
2018
Novelist and short story writer Stuart Evers, and the author, librettist and screenwriter Tessa McWatt.
2017
Author Hannah Kohler and writer and musician Bob Stanley.
2016
Author and editor William Atkins, and author Alison MacLeod. Atkins' The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places was published by Faber in 2018.
2015
Professor Sarah Churchwell and novelist Benjamin Markovits. Markovits' novel A Weekend in New York was published by Faber in 2018.
2014
Critic and writer Olivia Laing and journalist Erica Wagner. Laing's book The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone was published by Picador in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Wagner's Chief Engineer: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge was published in 2017 by Bloomsbury.
2013
Historian Andrea Wulf and poet and novelist John Burnside. Wulf’s book The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the lost Hero of Science was published by John Murray in October 2015 and won the 2015 Costa Biography Award and 2016 Royal Society Science Book Prize. Burnside's novel Ashland and Vine was published by Jonathan Cape in 2017.
2012
Writer Sheila Rowbotham and novelist Naomi Wood. During her 2012 residency, Wood researched her novel, Mrs Hemingway, which was published by Picador in 2014. Rowbotham's group biography Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers, and Radicals in Britain and the United States was published by Verso in 2016.How do I apply?
Details of how to apply for the 2025 award will be revealed in spring.
Portraits of the 2012–2018 award winners by Eccles Photography Fellow Ander McIntyre.
About the Eccles Centre
The Eccles Centre for American Studies was founded in 1991 to increase awareness and use of the British Library's extensive collections of books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers and sound recordings related to the United States, Canada and the Caribbean.
Housed within the British Library, the Centre works in collaboration with the Library's Americas curatorial team and external partners interested in the promotion of North American studies in the UK. The Centre runs a diverse events programme, funds research, offers training in the North American collections, and produces publications and digital exhibitions designed to introduce the quality and breadth of the collections.
