Celebrating honest, optimistic writing about the US South.
Announcing the Winners of the 2023 Willie Morris Awards
Nominations for the 2024 Awards will be accepted starting July 1, 2024.
ABOUT THE AWARDS
Each year, the Willie Morris Awards for Southern Writing honor some of the best literature telling rich, original stories about the US South marked by a strain of honest optimism. The award-winning works reflect a belief that things can be better, that the South—a region marked by systemic racism and economic extraction—can still be a place of opportunity and hope.
Willie Morris: A chronicler of the South’s complexity
Morris, for whom the awards are named, believed in the South.
A celebrated writer, editor, and teacher, he wrestled with his home region’s problems in his writing, while maintaining “hope for belonging, for belief in people’s better nature, for steadfastness against all that is hollow or crass or rootless or destructive.”
After his boyhood in Yazoo City, Miss., Morris left Mississippi for the University of Texas, then New York City. He eventually became the youngest editor of Harper’s Magazine before returning to his home state to settle in Oxford, where he continued writing and mentoring young writers.
Morris is remembered as both a prankster—making prank calls to friends around the country—and a serious writer—quietly slipping into solitary periods of deep work—with an affable, down-to-earth nature. His legacy lives on in the work of the writers he mentored, as well as books like North Toward Home and My Dog Skip.
“Willie’s body of work was astonishing, all of it imbued, in one way or another, with his generosity, keen intelligence, love of country—Mississippi, especially—and bonhomie.”
- RICHARD HOWORTH
OWNER, SQUARE BOOKS,
OXFORD, MISS.
PAST WINNERS:
How we celebrate our award winners
When Morris lived in Oxford, he would often take visiting authors to The Sizzler, a no-frills steakhouse on the outskirts of town once decorated with bowling trophies. While there, Morris was known to pull the trophies—hard-won by The Sizzler’s staff—off the walls and present them to author friends with a speech. At least one author was chased down in The Sizzler’s parking lot for trying to make off with one of the coveted trophies.
The Willie Morris Awards carry on Morris’ characteristically mischievous tradition. In addition to a cash prize, we present each winner with their very own bowling trophy at an intimate celebration during the Oxford Conference for the Book. While in Oxford, winners can also tour Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, attend a recording of Thacker Mountain Radio, visit Square Books and meet authors from Mississippi and across the country.
History of the Willie Morris Awards
Dave Williams and Reba White Williams
Established by Morris’s college roommate Dave Williams and his wife Reba White Williams in 2008, the awards are a fitting tribute to a man remembered as a champion of other writers.
Though they headed east after college like Morris, Reba, who was born in Mississippi and raised in North Carolina, and Dave, a native of Texas, are both Southerners. Reba was inspired to create the awards after learning that her nieces in high school in Charleston, S.C., had never read To Kill a Mockingbird. They hoped the awards would attract Southern fiction writers who had not yet been adequately recognized, and, in the process, raise the profile of contemporary Southern literature in general.
In 2019, the founders passed on the duties of managing the contest and prize money to the University of Mississippi, the state’s flagship university where Morris served as writer-in-residence while living on campus in a university-owned house he affectionately called his “bungalow.” The University of Mississippi’s Department of Writing and Rhetoric now oversees all aspects of the awards, including submissions, judging and the annual celebration of award winners in Oxford.