Special Occurrences
Occasionally, when consensus cannot be reached between judges over disputes about the winning story or the quality of work for that half year, no prize is awarded. The judges usually include contemporary writers, literary critics, and former winners of the prize. From 1945 through 1948, no prizes were awarded due to postwar instability.
On January 15, 2004, the awarding of the 130th Akutagawa Prize made significant news when two women became the award's youngest winners. The prize went to both Wataya Risa, 19, and Kanehara Hitomi, 20. Previously, the youngest Akutagawa winners were all males over 23 years old, among them the current Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara and novelist Kenzaburo Oe who later went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994.
Read more about this topic: Akutagawa Prize
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