Dame Gillian Beer has been awarded the 2017 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for her book, Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll.
A ceremony for Beer will be held today at 4 p.m. in the Senate Chamber of the Old Capitol. The $30,000 award, which is the largest cash prize for English-language literary criticism, is administered for the Truman Capote Estate by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Beer was the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1994 – 2002, and is a former President of Clare Hall College.
The reading will encompass a presentation of Beer’s work by Professor Claire Fox and a reading of Truman Capote’s writing.
-Charles Peckman