Which literary prize did C.S. Lewis win for The Allegory of Love in 1937?

C.S. Lewis won the Hawthornden Prize for The Allegory of Love in 1937.

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition was published in 1936 and examines the development of allegorical love poetry from classical and medieval sources. Lewis discusses courtly love and analyzes major works and traditions associated with authors such as Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, and Edmund Spenser.

The book helped establish Lewis’s reputation as a serious literary scholar before his popular Christian and children’s books became widely known. Its argument is not simply a history of romantic feeling. Lewis traces how writers created a literary convention in which love was presented through allegorical figures, abstractions, and elaborate poetic structures.

The Hawthornden Prize, founded in 1919, is one of Britain’s oldest literary prizes. Lewis received it in 1937, the year after publication. Readers sometimes confuse this award with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, which Lewis received later for English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, published in 1954.