The Saga Prize was a literary award for new Black British novelists, which ran from 1995 to 1998.
History
The actress and writer Marsha Hunt established the Saga Prize in 1995 to recognise the literature emerging from 'indigenous black Britons' experiences.
The prize – of £3,000 and a book contract – was for unpublished first novels. To be eligible, entrants needed a black African ancestor and to have been born in the
United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland. The prize was sponsored by the travel firm
Saga plc.
Judges included
Andrea Levy and
Margaret Busby.
[Margaret Busby, "Andrea Levy remembered", Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 6 July 2020.]
The "Afrocentrism" nature of the Saga Prize and its restrictive definition of Black people caused controversy.[Mark Stein, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation, Ohio State University Press, 2004, p. 15.]
The prize ran for four years and closed in 1998
Winners and further literary careers
(2025). 9780349108728, Abacus. ISBN 9780349108728
Some Kind of Black (1997) centred on the youthful adventures of its British-born Nigerian protagonist, Dele, in London. The book also won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain's New Writer of the Year Award, the Author's Club First Novel Award, and a Betty Trask Award. It was also longlisted for the
.Adebayo wrote one further novel and became a Creative Writing Lecturer.
.
