Biannual Townsend Prize for Fiction Open Now for Support, Submissions

BY CHIP BELL

Preparations for the biannual Atlanta Writers Club-Georgia Writers Museum Townsend Prize for Fiction have begun. Tickets are available for the awards ceremony next April, and donations and submissions are being accepted for the highest Georgia award given to a literary fiction writer.

“I was honored to be nominated for the Townsend Prize for Fiction,” said Xhenet Aliu, 2020 Townsend Prize winner for Brass. “It affirmed to me that the work itself really matters. That kind of validation did a lot to encourage me to keep going with the next project.”

The Prize was begun in 1981 to honor the legacy of Jim Townsend, founding editor of Atlanta magazine – the model of the modern city magazine – and mentor to a generation of iconic Southern writers like Pat Conroy and Anne Rivers Siddons. Administered since the 1990s by Georgia Perimeter College (now Georgia State University Perimeter College) and The Chattahoochee Review, the stewardship of the Prize passed to the AWC in 2021. In the spring of 2023, Georgia Writers Museum joined the AWC as co-partner in the Prize administration.

The 2025 Townsend Prize for Fiction ceremony will be held on April 16, 2025, at the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center in Atlanta.

“We hope you will attend the gala event as well as contribute,” said Atlanta Writers Club Executive Director George Weinstein.

Contact AWC at www.atlantawritersclub.org for more information, to donate, and/or to purchase tickets.