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The Royal Society of Literature

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The Royal Society of Literature

The RSL is a charity that celebrates and nurtures reading and writing of all kinds. 200 years young🌟 Membership is open to all.

Founded in 1820, the Royal Society of Literature is Britain's national charity for the advancement of literature.

15/07/2026

We were delighted to award this year's Benson Medal to Judith Palmer at our annual RSL summer party last month.

Upon receiving this accolade, Palmer said “I’m really overwhelmed. It’s an amazing honour to be here. Organisations like the Poetry Society and the Royal Society of Literature persist because they matter. Literature development does make a difference in making people feel they belong, in throwing open the doors to an ever-growing community of people and saying ‘you are welcome here, as readers and as writers’.”

Palmer has been Director of The Poetry Society since 2008, where she has focused on developing new generations of poets and commissioning new work. A writer, broadcaster and journalist, she has a background in literature development (including at the Southbank Centre and the Women’s Library), publishing, and curating public event programmes. She has research interests in collaborative and nature-based practice, and created the Field Hospital oral history project for Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. She is a Trustee of the Keats Foundation.

Founded in 1916 by scholar, author and RSL Fellow A.C. Benson, the Benson Medal honours service to literature across a whole career.

10/07/2026

Throughout 2025, our four RSL Jerwood Poetry Award winners embarked on their own individual journey of discovery and creation, before coming together to create a final collaborative work ‘The Clearing’, which was performed at this year’s Hay Festival.

In the spirit of the awards, which brought together four poets from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, we invite writers from across the UK to submit their own poetry in response to the work. The RSL welcomes responses to one or all of a series of five prompts related to ‘The Clearing’.

Each poem submitted will be featured on an online ‘poetry map’, with one winning poem receiving a spotlight in our monthly newsletter, sent to our community of RSL Members, Fellows and subscribers. The contest will remain open until 5pm on Monday 31 August, and the winning poem will be featured in our September mailing.

Submit your entry through the link - please ensure that you have read the terms and conditions prior to entry: https://rsliterature.org/join-in/awards-and-prizes/the-clearing-writing-contest-entry-form/

We are grateful to the Jerwood Foundation and Creative Scotland for their support of the 2024 RSL Jerwood Poetry Awards

29/06/2026

We are delighted to announce our 2026 cohort of Fellows and Honorary Fellows, who were inducted into the Royal Society of Literature this evening.

The 2026 Fellows: Arifa Akbar, Jake Arnott, Joanna Biggs, Dinah Birch, Leo Boix, James Campbell, Lauren Child, Patricia Duncker, Melissa Harrison, Sophie Herxheimer, Katie Hickman, Kapka Kassabova, Stuart Kelly, Nigella Lawson, Roger Lewis, Tim Liardet, Ankhi Mukherjee, Chris Riddell, Claudia Roden, Lola Shoneyin, Nell Stevens and Philip Terry.

The 2026 Honorary Fellows: Paul Burston, Elise Dillsworth, Ted Hodgkinson, Caroline McCormick, Judith Palmer and Reza Vishkai.

We are also pleased to award the 2026 Benson Medal to Judith Palmer, Director of The Poetry Society. Founded in 1916 by scholar, author and RSL Fellow A.C. Benson, the Benson Medal honours service to literature across a whole career.

The RSL offers our warm congratulations to each new Fellow and Honorary Fellow, and thanks them for their contributions to literature across the UK and beyond.

26/06/2026

There's less than two weeks left to apply for the first year of the RSL Hawthornden Literature Matters Grants.

The RSL Hawthornden Literature Matters Grants are a major intervention by the RSL and Hawthornden Foundation in support of literature, an area of the arts which is critically under-supported.

Applications are open until 9am on Wednesday 8 July. Submit yours online at www.rsliterature.org/rsl-hawthornden-literature-matters-grants/

If you're interested in contributing to the Literature Matters grants and promoting literature in communities across the UK, please get in touch on [email protected].

24/06/2026

Congratulations to this year's winner of the RSL Christopher Bland Prize, Frank Thabani Sayi for his memoir No Safer Kinder Hatred.

Sayi’s memoir tells of a childhood conditioned in the shadow of the mayhem brought about by the structure and dehumanising effects of colonialism, its dreadful legacy, and the impact of civil war. Chair of judges A.L. Kennedy surprised Sayi with the news and told him that reading No Safer Kinder Hatred was ‘not just meeting the writer, it’s meeting something deep within you that’s courageous and extraordinary and true’.

We offer our thanks to this year's judges A.L. Kennedy, Derek Owusu and Louise Kennedy, as well as the Bland family for their support of this prize. The prize, now in its eighth year, is an annual award of £10,000 given to a debut novelist or non-fiction writer first published aged 50 or over.

17/06/2026

Dalloway Day, the annual celebration of Woolf’s landmark novel taking place over a Wednesday in mid-June, has arrived. This year, we are excited to announce the launch of a new nationwide initiative designed to provide female writers with uninterrupted time and space to work.

Conceived by and delivered in partnership with RSL Fellow Esther Freud, A Week of One’s Own will provide week-long residencies to professionally active women writers, supplemented with a small grant towards their expenses.

Esther Freud said: “When I was caring for my children, running a house and always, it seemed, attempting to finish a novel, I longed for nothing more than a quiet place to write. Not only that, but the permission, encouragement even, to spend a few days, maybe even a week, away from all distractions. This is why I’m setting up the initiative: A Week of One’s Own, to give women writers an opportunity to see what a little time and space might afford them.”

The first round of A Week of One’s Own residencies will take place in 2027, with applications opening later this year. Each residency will take place in a property provided by our generous hosts, who will volunteer a space available for the exclusive use of the writer throughout their stay.

We are hugely grateful to Esther Freud and to those who have already offered accommodation. If you are interested in offering support towards these residencies, either by providing a property or a donation towards writer’s grants, please contact [email protected].

01/06/2026

'To evoke the spirit of a place has been the animating intention of all my novels and stories.’

We are thrilled to award the 2026 RSL Ondaatje Prize to A House for Miss Pauline, written by Diana McCaulay.

Diana McCaulay is an award-winning Jamaican writer and environmental activist, resident on the island. She has written six published novels and numerous short stories and articles. She won the Commonwealth Short Story prize twice, in 2012 and 2022, and is the founder of the Jamaica Environment Trust.

Judge Claire Armitstead called A House for Miss Pauline: ‘An evocative and powerful novel of belonging, with a fabulously eccentric protagonist, which complicates everything we assume about colonial history in all the right ways.’

The RSL is grateful to this year’s panel of judges Claire Armitstead, Emma Dabiri and Ekow Eshun for their work, as well as the Ondaatje family for their generous support of the prize.

28/05/2026

We're thrilled to announce the 2026 shortlist for the RSL Christopher Bland Prize, awarded to a debut novelist or non-fiction writer first published in any form aged 50 or over:

A Room Above A Shop by Anthony Shapland
No Safer Kinder Hatred by Frank Sayi
The Absence by Budgie
The Departed by Sarah Mellor
The Eights by Joanna Miller
The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet

This year's prize, selected by judges A. L. Kennedy, Louise Kennedy and Derek Owusu, will be announced on 24 June 2026.

27/05/2026

We've extended the deadline for submissions to the 2027 V. S. Pritchett Short Story Prize - you now have until 5pm on Monday 22 June to send us your story.

The V. S. Pritchett Short Story Prize is a £1,000 Prize for the best unpublished short story of the year, which will also be published in our annual Review magazine.

This year's prize will be judged by Peter Hobbs, Annette Brooke, and Caroline O’Donoghue. Apply now through the link: https://rsliterature.org/vs-pritchett-short-story-prize/

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