The Lillian Smith Book Awards' are an award which honors those authors who, through their outstanding writing about the American South, carry on Lillian Smith's legacy of elucidating the condition of racial and social inequity and proposing a vision of justice and human understanding. The award is jointly presented by the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries.
Since 1968, the awards have been presented annually, except for 2003 when the Southern Regional Council experienced funding shortfalls. It is the South's oldest and best-known book award, and is presented in fiction and non-fiction categories.
Past honorees
1968 winner
George B. Tindall for The Emergence of the New South: 1913-1945, Louisiana State University Press.
1969 winner
Dan T. Carter for Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, Louisiana State University Press.
1970 winner
Paul M. Gaston for The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking, Alfred A. Knopf.
1971 winner
Anthony Dunbar for Our Land, Too, Pantheon Books.
1972 winner
Robert Coles for Children of Crisis, Vol. II: Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers, and Volume III: The South Goes North, Little, Brown and Company.
1973 winners
Harold Martin for Ralph McGill, Reporter, Little Brown and Company. Alice Walker for Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
1974 winners
C. Vann Woodward for The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Oxford University Press. Albert Murray for Train Whistle Guitar, McGraw-Hill.
1976 winners
James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis for Mississippi: Conflict and Change, Pantheon Books. Reynolds Price for The Surface of Earth, Atheneum.
1977 winners
Alex Haley for Roots, Doubleday. Richard Kluger for Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality, Alfred A. Knopf.
1978 winners
Will D. Campbell for Brother to a Dragonfly, The Seabury Press. Garrett Epps for The Shad Treatment, Putnam.
1979 winners
Marion Wright and Arnold Shankman for Human Rights Odyssey, Moore Publishing. Ernest J. Gaines for In My Father's House, Alfred A. Knopf.
1980 winners
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall for Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching, Columbia University Press. Cormac McCarthy for Suttree, Random House.
1981 winners
John Gaventa for Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, University of Illinois Press. Pat Conroy for The Lords of Discipline, Houghton Mifflin.
1982 winners
Harry S. Ashmore for Hearts and Minds: The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan, McGraw-Hill. John Ehle for The Winter People, Harper & Row.
1983 winners
Fred Hobson for South-Watching: Selected Essays by Gerald W. Johnson, University of North Carolina Press. Roy Hoffman for Almost Family, Dial Press.
1984 winners
John Egerton for Generations: An American Family, University of Kentucky Press. Alice Walker for In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Eudora Welty - Special Lifetime Award.
1985 winners
James Farmer for Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement, Arbor House. Peter Taylor for The Old Forest and Other Stories, Dial Press.
1986 winner
for Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas, Houghton Mifflin.
1987 winners
Thomas L. Johnson, and Phillip C. Dunn (ed.) for A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920–1936, Algonquin Books. Pauli Murray for Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, Harper & Row. Mary Hood for And Venus is Blue: Stories, Ticknor & Fields.
1988 winners
Melton A. McLaurin for Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South, University of Georgia Press. C. Eric Lincoln for The Avenue: Clayton City, Morrow.
1989 winners
Melany Neilson for Even Mississippi, University of Alabama Press. Madison Smartt Bell for Soldier's Joy, Ticknor & Fields. Gloria Naylor for Mama Day, Ticknor & Fields.
1990 winners
Wayne Flynt for Poor But Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites, University of Alabama Press. Dori Sanders for Clover: A Novel, Algonquin Books.
1991 winners
J.L. Chestnut, Jr., and Julia Cass for Black in Selma : The Uncommon Life of J.L. Chestnut, Jr.: Politics and Power in a Small American Town, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Mary Ward Brown for Tongues of Flame, E.P. Dutton.