Katharine Briggs Folklore Award


The Katharine Briggs Folklore Award is an annual book prize awarded by The Folklore Society in honour of Katharine Mary Briggs. The prize is designed to promote the study of folklore and improve the standard of folklore publications in Britain and Ireland, while it also aims to establish The Folklore Society as an arbiter of excellence in the field. The rules interpret ‘Folklore Studies’ broadly, in order to cover all aspects of traditional and popular culture, narrative, beliefs, customs and folk arts, including studies of a literary, anthropological, linguistic, sociological or geographical nature. The Award is presented at a reception following the annual Katharine Briggs Lecture, at which time the runner-up and short-listed books are also acknowledged. The judges report is published in the journal Folklore, which is one of the earliest journals in the field of folkloristics. Even though the rules stipulate that it can be withheld if the judges find in any given year that no book has reached the required standard, the prize has been awarded every year since it was first announced in 1982.
Notable winners include Israeli historian of social memory Guy Beiner, American scholar of fairy tales Jack Zipes, English mythographer Marina Warner, British radical historian E.P. Thompson, English married team of folklorists Iona and Peter Opie and Soviet folklorist Vladimir Propp.

Previous winners

Winners of the Award include: