International Vladimir Nabokov Society Prizes
IVNS is now accepting submissions for its 2025 round of prizes. Applications are encouraged for all eligible work.
Note for 2025: please make nominations by August 1st (there will be a grace period for those traveling).
The Jane Grayson 1st Book Prize is in an off-year; books dated 2024 and 2025 will be judged in 2026.
The Brian Boyd 2nd Book Prize competition is on this year: books copyrighted in 2022, 2023, and 2024 are eligible for nomination.
--------------------------
In 2018, the International Vladimir Nabokov Society established a group of prizes generously funded by the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation. The first four rounds of prizes (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023) have been awarded and the winners of these prizes are listed below.
Administration and Funding: These prizes are administered, selected, and awarded by the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, and funded by the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation. In all cases they will be awarded only where there is work of sufficient merit. In the case when two winners share one prize, the prize money will be shared between them.
Timing: Prizes awarded in 2025 will be for work either submitted (in the case of undergraduate and postgraduate essays, theses and chapters), examined and accepted (in the case of the best dissertation prize) in 2024 or 2025, or published (official copyright) (in the case of the other prizes) in the calendar year 2024, except for the Jane Grayson and Brian Boyd Prizes which are awarded every two years and every three years, respectively.
Language: Submissions can be made in Russian, French, and English.
Submission: All academic work and publications to be considered for prizes need to have reached the judges’ attention by August 1st, 2025 (with a small grace period of a couple of weeks). Please contact the President and Vice-President of the IVNS, Marie Bouchet and Matt Roth, nabokovprizes@yahoo.com.
Announcement: The prizes will be announced in December 2025 on this website and on Nabokv-L, the Nabokov listserv.
Ellen Pifer Prize for Best Undergraduate Student Essay on Nabokov
Awarded annually for an undergraduate essay between 2500-5000 words, submitted for assessment at their institutions in fall 2024 or spring 2025. Value $200. Nominations (including self-nominations) should be sent to the President and Vice-President of the IVNS at nabokovprizes@yahoo.com.
Named in honor of American Nabokov scholar Ellen Pifer.
2024: Madeleine Moino, “You’re NOT Everything I Imagined: The Distorting Power of Distance in Nabokov’s Works”
Madeleine Moino’s essay on distance in Nabokov’s work develops a sophisticated and nuanced argument in clear and elegant prose. Her essay offers an intriguing examination of the metaphorical and literal function of distance and proximity in Nabokov’s work and how it relates to Nabokov’s aesthetics and ethics. She argues that Nabokov’s male characters maintain a continuous distance from their objects of desire to sustain the fantasy which feeds this very desire. In particular, her analysis of the narrator’s “ocular relationship” with his childhood crush Polenka offers a new reading of this frequently overlooked relationship in Nabokov’s wider work. The judges were pleased to see that a new generation of Nabokov scholars continues to develop interesting and engaging critical work on Nabokov and gender.
2023: The prize is shared by two winners: Song Yuhong, “The Language and Sight in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading,” and Erika Massimo, “The Three Minus One System: A Comparison Between Anna Karenina and Ada.”
2021: Sophia Houghton (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) for “Fated Text, Autonomous Design: Aubrey Beardsley’s Spectral Legacy in Lolita”
2020: Alisa Shimoyama (University of East Anglia, UK) for “Reality and Fiction in Nabokov’s Last Three Completed Novels”
2019: Matt Walker (Ohio State University) for ‘“Being Aware of Being Aware of Being”: Nabokov’s Invitation to the Beyond”’.
Dieter E. Zimmer Prize for Best Postgraduate Work on Nabokov
Awarded annually, to the best work on Nabokov done at the graduate (but pre-ABD) level; this year covers fall 2024 and spring 2025. Graduate-course essays and Master's theses encouraged. Master's theses will be accepted up to a maximum of 40 000 words. Doctoral-dissertation chapters or accepted-for-publication essays do not qualify for this prize. Value $1500.
Named in honor of German Nabokov scholar, translator, and editor Dieter E. Zimmer.
2024: No winner selected
2023: Sydney Stotter, “'Objects in the Photograph May Be Closer Than They Appear': The Photorealistic and Photo-fantastic in Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift and Invitation to a Beheading”
2022: Charlotte Lamontagne (Université Paris Cité), for “Listening to Lolita” (MA dissertation)
2021: Avital Nemzer (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) for "'A Birch-Lime-Willow-Aspen-Poplar-Oak Man': Images of Trees, Temporospatial Liminality, and the Metaphysical in the Works of Vladimir Nabokov"
2020: Luke Sayers (Baylor University, USA) for “‘America’s Russian’: Vladimir Nabokov and the Cultural Cold War”
2019: Erik Eklund (University of Nottingham), for ‘“A Green Lane in Paradise”: Eschatology and Theurgy in Humbert Humbert’s Lolita’
Zoran Kuzmanovich Prize for Best PhD Dissertation on Nabokov
Awarded annually for the best dissertation predominantly (at least 50%) on Nabokov. Eligibility is based on year of formal submission/acceptance of dissertation and conferral of degree. Value $1500.
This prize honors the support given to young scholars by American Nabokov scholar Zoran Kuzmanovich through his editorial work at Nabokov Studies, at MLA conferences, and in other ways, including establishing and funding the original PhD prize as the Kuzmanovich Family Prize.
First award:
2024: Erik Eklund, “A Triptych of Bottomless Light: Repetition, Identity and Transcendence in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire”
Erik Eklund’s “A Triptych of Bottomless Light: Repetition, Identity and Transcendence in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire” is an original and valuable contribution to Nabokov scholarship. Its innovations entail not only the perspective of theology, but the elaboration of the textual performance of “non-identical repetition” as pervasive and significant.
Providing an insightful, specific, and well-supported reading of a novel that is much discussed but never exhausted, the thesis addresses the challenge of choice (e.g., the thematic primacy of Kinbote’s commentary or Shade’s poem) by discerning, throughout, parallel elements and patterns in addition to salient contrasts. Pale Fire does not require either-or thinking. The transcendent “otherworld” is everywhere within it.
The thesis is enriched by its focus on Pale Fire within the context of Nabokov’s biography and other writings, to the extent that there is much to learn not only about Pale Fire, but about the rest of Nabokov’s oeuvre and imagination. The close reading in Chapter Five of the novel’s “theological heart” is a tour de force, with its scrutiny of “two texts within Nabokov’s theological library: On the Trinity of Augustine and Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.”
The thesis constitutes a model of scholarship that is thoroughly informed about the background of the critical conversation (regarding Nabokov as well as this novel), while illuminating Pale Fire by reading it as if for the first time, by giving sharp attention to Kinbote’s Christian faith (especially in Chapter Four) and to religious allusions, including the relevance of Old English Boethius. As an interdisciplinary work, it is also a model of scholarship “delineating a theological authorial presence” in the work of an author whose explicit statements on religion were more equivocal than transparent.
Erik Eklund’s thesis is ambitious and inspiring; reading it is a command to rise to the occasion.
2019 (2 co-winners:)
Brendan Nieubuurt, "Flesh Made World: Inscription and the Embodied Self in Osip Mandel'shtam and Vladimir Nabokov" (Columbia University 2018), and
Agnès Edel-Roy,“'Une ‘démocratie magique': Politique et littérature dans les romans de Vladimir Nabokov” (Université Paris Est, 2018).
2017 Award: Constantine Muravnik, Nabokov's Philosophy of Art (excerpt)
Gennady Barabtarlo Best Essay Prize
Awarded annually for the best academic article or book chapter on Nabokov, based on official publication date of journal/book (latest date of year-range, if multi-year). Current year for nominations: 2024. Value $500.
Named in honor of Russian-American Nabokov scholar and editor, Gennady Barabtarlo.
2024: Agnès Edel-Roy, "Le vertige visionnaire de Lolita: #DitdeDolly"
Agnès Edel-Roy’s “Le vertige visionnaire de Lolita: #DitdeDolly” offers a perspective which is both bold and overdue heralding Lolita as a visionary novel when it comes to literary tellings of sexual abuse. She diligently chronicles the sentimental and abusive misreading of the novel, from its inceptions to today. Moving beyond the false and simplistic view of a debate between puritans and libertines, Edel-Roy makes a compelling case for a sharp and detail-oriented reckoning of Lolita’s critical and popular reception. Reminding us of how the misreading of the novel occurred in spite of Nabokov’s own explanations and protest, as well as, most importantly, the text of the novel itself, she brings home a vision of Nabokov as exceptionally clear-minded and ahead of his time when discussing the vulnerable and constrained position of children living in an adult world. She pays homage to him as the author of a critical art, an “art of emancipation” which, though it was misunderstood as echoing or even promoting abuse at the time, can now, in the context of global feminist and anti-abuse movements, be seen as a visionary work of art exposing the reality of sexual abuse.
2023: Erik Eklund, “’The Name of God has Priority’: ‘God’ and the Apophatic Element in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire," Literature and Theology, Volume 36, Issue 3, September 2022, Pages 298–315.
2022: Winner: Jose Vergara, "Vladimir Nabokov: Translating the Ghosts of the Past," from his book All Future Plunges to the Past (Cornell UP, 2021)
Honourable Mention: Lara Delage-Toriel, "A Tactile Sensation is a Blind Spot: Nabokov’s Aesthetics of Touch," in M. Bouchet et al. (eds), The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Work (2020)
2021: Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, "Visual Agnosia in Nabokov: When One of the Senses Can't Make Sense," in The Five Senses in Nabokov's Works, edited by Marie Bouchet, Julie Loison-Charles, and Isabelle Poulin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 123-38.
2020: Tatyana Gershkovich (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) for "Suspicion on Trial: Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Nabokov’s 'Pozdnyshev’s Address'" in PMLA 134.3 (2019): 459-74.
2019: Stephen Blackwell (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) for his article, ‘Calendar Anomalies, Pushkin and Aesthetic Love in Nabokov’, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 96, No. 3 (July 2018), pp. 401-431.
Jane Grayson Best First Book Prize
Starting in 2023, the prize are awarded every two years for a first monograph that makes a significant contribution to Nabokov studies. Collections of essays are not eligible. Books constituting, substantially, a published dissertation previously awarded the Zoran Kuzmanovich Prize are not eligible for the Jane Grayson Prize. The Jane Grayson Prize will be awarded next in 2026 for a book published between 2024 or 2025. No competition in 2025.
Value $1500.
Named in honor of British Nabokov scholar, Jane Grayson.
2024: Tatyana Gershkovich, Art in Doubt (2022)
The premise of this subtle book is that Tolstoy and Nabokov, opposite in so many ways, share a troubled ground. Nabokov's "mature style is as baroque as Tolstoy's is ascetic", but "their rival styles... were reached by parallel flights from the same fear" [p.3]. Through close readings of a number of works by both authors, Professor Gershkovich takes us on an engaging journey into and out of doubt – although we are never out of it for long. "Disappointed desire" [p.21] haunts both authors. They deny "the possibility of certainty about another person's meaning while at the same time longing for it" [p.62]. "Each set off what might be called controlled explosions of suspicion: they stimulate our suspicion to subsequently cast doubt on its virtues and point up the possibility of a more trusting attitude to the author's words" [p.125]. As Professor Gershkovich deftly elucidates, the issue of doubt generates complex ramifications that extend ultimately to the creative process, and her discussion of its consequences in The Gift especially, for the novel’s actual and fictive authors, is both thought-provoking and persuasive, and offers one of the most compelling readings of the novel to date. Her chapter on Pale Fire ends with the elegant suggestion that "we begin by suspecting Kinbote but end by suspecting with him” [p.154].
2022: Robert Alter, Nabokov and the Real World (Princeton, 2021).
The referees of the 2022 Jane Grayson Prize find Robert Alter’s Nabokov and the World: Between Appreciation and Defense (Princeton University Press, 2021) inspiring in a meaningful and invigorating way. Apart from being an unconventional tribute to the writer, it is also a contemplation of Nabokov’s art which points the reader towards in-depth, investigative reading and re-reading. Alter has his eyes fixed on the text and the extra-textual reality behind that text; he honors the multilayered structure of Nabokovian narrative; he appreciates the tragic underpinnings of Nabokov’s wit, thus making those who may yet have to discover Nabokov’s depth look in the right direction. This prize recognizes Robert Alter’s contribution to the field of Nabokov studies, a contribution the magnitude of which becomes apparent to the reader of this book.
2021: Alexander Spektor (University of Georgia) for The Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov (Northwestern UP, 2020)
2020: Awarded jointly to
Andrei Babikov (Alexander Solzhenitsyn House of Russian Abroad, Moscow, Russian Federation) for Прочтение Набокова. Изыскания и материалы (Perusing Nabokov: Studies and Materials).
Stanislav Shvabrin (The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA) for Between Rhyme and Reason: Vladimir Nabokov, Translation, and Dialogue.
2019: Michael Rodgers (Open University, UK) for his monograph Nabokov and Nietzsche: Problems and Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2018).
First award of the Nabokov First Book Prize (as the biennial Samuel Schuman Prize, funded by the Kuzmanovich Family trust):
Brian Boyd Prize for Best Second Book on Nabokov
Awarded every three years for a second book, at least 50% on Nabokov, by someone who has already published a first book predominantly on Nabokov. If the book includes previously published articles, they should be recent and united by the book’s over-arching theme. Collections of essays are not eligible. Value $1000. The Brian Boyd Prize was awarded in 2019 for work published 2016 – 2018 and in 2022 for work published 2019 – 2021. It will be awarded again in 2025 for work with official copyright dates of between 2022—2024.
Named in honor of New Zealand Nabokov scholar, Brian Boyd. (Next adjudicated in 2025)
2022: Dana Dragunoiu (Carleton University, Canada) for Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts (Northwestern University Press, 2021).
From a field of very strong nominations, the winner is Dana Dragunoiu’s Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts. The judges found this to be a brave, creative treatment of ground well-prepared by earlier scholars interested in the ethical side of Nabokov, beginning with Ellen Pifer’s classic Nabokov and the Novel. The ethical–aesthetic and reality–artifice dichotomies are just about the main contentions posed by Nabokov, and in the chivalry/courtesy model Dragunoiu has lighted upon a cap which fits most of the oeuvre, which gets to the heart of the matter, and which doesn’t duck problematic and sensitive topics; it gives the feeling of serving as much more than mere intellectual entertainment. Here is a book with consequential stakes (as the stakes of courtesy are so often consequential in the works she elucidates). The judges appreciate the tact with which Dragunoiu draws attention to Nabokov’s potentially negative anti-social traits, and to his awareness of them, without feeling it incumbent on her to defend or accuse. The way she uses the chivalry/courtesy model to put Nabokov’s works into unexpected conversations with the Gawain poet, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Kant, Tolstoy, and Proust brings readers to a significantly enriched understanding of Nabokov’s moral and ethical concerns, and the traditions he draws from in engaging them.
2019: Stephen Blackwell (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) and Kurt Johnson (Florida State Collection of Arthropods, Gainesville) for Fine Lines: Vladimir Nabokov’s Scientific Art (Yale University Press, 2016).
Vladimir Nabokov Society Travel Support Grants
Up to five travel scholarships of $500 will be awarded annually to younger scholars presenting at conferences supported by the IVNS. This information will soon be revised and moved to a new page and menu link.
Nabokov Studies Prize
This prize is generously funded by Zoran Kuzmanovich, the editor of Nabokov Studies.
The Donald Barton Johnson Prize
For the best essay published in Nabokov Studies honors the founding editor of Nabokov Studies. The prize is voted on by a rotating subset of the Nabokov Studies Editorial Board and members of the Davidson College Faculty. The winner is chosen with a view to expanding the intellectual challenge and the range of Nabokov studies as well as deepening the human and professional connections among Nabokov scholars.
2017 Award: Deborah A. Martinsen
Nabokov Online Journal Prizes
NOJ Prize for Best Contribution to Nabokov studies. Biennial, after first award. Value $600. Selected by popular vote.
2012 (for 2000-2011). Brian Boyd, Nabokov's Ada: The Place of Consciousness (2nd rev. ed., 2001).
2013 Stephen H. Blackwell, The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and the Worlds of Science (2009).
NOJ Award for the Best Student Essay on Nabokov. Annual. Value $300.
PEN Nabokov Prize
The PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature is a lifetime award, selected annually by a panel chosen by PEN American Center, for a living author whose body of work, either written in or translated into English, is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship. The winner receives a $50,000 prize, funded by the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation.
2017 award: Adonis
2018 award: Edna O'Brien
2019 award: Sandra Cisneros
In its initial form the Prize was set up by PEN American Center and Dmitri Nabokov in 2000, was biennial, worth $20,000, and awarded to writers, principally novelists, "whose works evoke to some measure Nabokov's brilliant versatility and commitment to literature as a search for the deepest truth and the highest pleasure—what Nabokov called the 'indescribable tingle of the spine'" (to cite a no longer valid PEN American Center link). Under its initial terms, it was awarded in 2000 to William H. Gass, in 2002 to Mario Vargas Llosa, in 2004 to Mavis Gallant, in 2006 to Philip Roth, and in 2008 to Cynthia Ozick. The award then lapsed until it was revived under the new terms above in 2016.