Queen Mary Professor wins Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism

The prestigious $30,000 award, administered by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa on behalf of the Truman Capote Literary Trust, is the largest annual cash prize for English-language literary criticism. Professor Brady will travel to Iowa on 15 October 2025 to accept the prize at a ceremony hosted by the Workshop.

Described as a major intervention in lyric studies, Poetry and Bondage is a comprehensive history of poetic constraint. For millennia, poets have compared verse to bondage: chains, fetters, cells or slavery. Tracing this metaphor from Ovid through the present, Brady reveals the contributions to poetics of those actually in bondage. The book asks how our understanding of the lyric, and the political freedoms and forms of human being it is supposed to epitomise, changes if we listen to the voices of enslaved and imprisoned poets.

Bringing canonical and contemporary poets into dialogue, from Thomas Wyatt to Rob Halpern, Emily Dickinson to M. NourbeSe Philip, and Phillis Wheatley to Lisa Robertson, the book also examines poetry that emerged from the plantation and the prison. By interrogating the whiteness of lyric studies and literary criticism, Poetry and Bondage opens new possibilities for committed poetry today.

Professor Brady said:

"I am honoured to receive the Truman Capote Award, which recognises the value of literary criticism at a time when the humanities are under intense pressure. My book argues that poetry is not a marginal form, but a vital means through which people - especially those in bondage have explored freedom, constraint, pleasure and pain. The stories we tell about literature become richer when we include voices excluded from its history. I am deeply grateful to the judges for supporting this inclusive vision of our discipline."

The prize, endowed by the Truman Capote Literary Trust and established in 1994, was created in accordance with Capote’s will to honour critic Newton Arvin. Previous winners include Susan Stewart, Elaine Showalter and Gene Jarrett.

Professor Brady is Professor of Poetry and Director of Research in the School of the Arts at Queen Mary University of London, where her research and teaching focus on contemporary poetry, literature and political theory.

Poetry and Bondage: A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint (Cambridge University Press, 2021) is available to purchase here.