History
The prize was initiated in 1942 by Jane Oliver in memory of her husband John Llewellyn Rhys, a young author who was killed on 5 August 1940 while serving as a bomber pilot in the Royal Air Force.
From 1987 to 2003, the prize was funded by the Mail on Sunday. The newspaper withdrew in 2003, after the 2002 prize was awarded to Mary Laven. Since then, the prize has been sponsored by Booktrust, an independent educational charity.
In June 2011 the award was 'suspended' by Booktrust due to funding problems. There was no award for 2011. Booktrust said that it "strongly" intended to bring the award "back with a bang as soon as possible" as it looked for outside funding sources.
As of 2010 the winner receives £5,000, while the runners-up each receive £500.
Read more about this topic: John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
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“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
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