Book Awards
Each year CCL awards a citation to the author of a work that "has contributed most to the dialogue between literature and the Christian faith." Occasionally, double awards are given, one for scholarship and another for belles lettres. The award is made at the annual MLA national meeting, which is held in the last week of December.
See our Guidelines for more information about nominating a book for the award.
Recent recipients of the CCL Book of the Year Award
2011
Aidan Nichols
The Poet as Believer: A Theological Study of Paul Claudel
Ashgate
2010
Sarah McNamer
Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion
University of Pennsylvania Press
Text of the 2010 Citation
2009
James Kearney
The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England
University of Pennsylvania Press
Text of the 2009 Citation
2008
Jessica Brantley
Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance
in Late Medieval England
University of Chicago Press
Text of the 2008 Citation
2007
Scholarly Work
Lori Branch
Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth
Baylor University Press
Honorable Mention
Christine Baur
Dante's Hermeneutics of Salvation: Passages to Freedom in the Divine Comedy
University of Toronto Press
Belles Lettres
Tania Runyan
Delicious Air
Finishing Line Press
Text of 2007 citations
2006
Arthur Kirsch
Auden and Christianity
Yale University Press
Text of citation
Susannah Brietz Monta
Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England
Cambridge University Press
Text of citation
2004
Rod Jellema
A Slender Grace
William B. Eerdmans
2003
Paul Elie
The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
2002
Jeffrey Knapp
Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England
University of Chicago Press
Julia Kasdorf
The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life
Johns Hopkins Press
2001
Ramie Targoff
Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England
University of Chicago Press
2000
Velma Bourgeois Richmond
Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance
Continuum Press
Peggy Rosenthal
(Honorable Mention)
The Poet's Jesus: Representations at the End of a Millennium
Oxford University Press
1999
Ruth Coates
Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author
Cambridge University Press
1998
Jaroslav Pelikan
What Has Athens to Do With Jerusalem?: Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint
University of Michigan Press
Roger Lundin
(Honorable Mention)
Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief
William B. Eerdmans
1997
Robert M. Ryan
The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789-1824
Cambridge University Press
1996
David Lyle Jeffrey
People of the Book: Christian Identity in Literary Culture
William B. Eerdmans
Madeleine L'Engle
Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols
Harold Shaw Publishers
1995
Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr.
Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision
Continuum Publishing Company
Denise Nowakowski Baker
(Honorable Mention)
Julian of Norwich, Showings: From Vision to Book
Princeton University Press
1994
David Norton
A History of the Bible as Literature, 2 volumes
Cambridge University Press
1993
David Lyle Jeffrey
The Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature
William B. Eerdmans
Frederick Buechner
The Son of Laughter
Harper and Row
1992
Ricardo J. Quinones
The Changes of Cain: Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature
Princeton University Press
1991
Michael Wheeler
Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology
Cambridge University Press
1990
Harriet Guest
A Form of Sound Words: The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart
Oxford University Press
Leslie Brisman
(Honorable Mention)
The Voice of Jacob: On the Composition of Genesis
Indiana University Press
1989
John Gatta
Gracious Laughter: The Meditative Wit of Edward Taylor
University of Missouri Press
James Farl Powers
Wheat That Springeth Green
Alfred A. Knopf
1988
Michael G. Hall
The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather
Wesleyan University Press
1987
Stephen Prickett
Words and 'the Word': Language, Poetics, and Biblical Interpretation
Cambridge University Press
1986
Chana Bloch
Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible
University of California Press
1985
Michael Joseph Colacurcio
The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne,s Early Tales
Harvard University Press
1984
Richard E. Brantley
Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism
University Presses of Florida
1983
Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
1982
Northrop Frye
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
1981
George Hunt
John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things
William B. Eerdmans
1980
James Dougherty
The Fivesquare City: The City in the Religious Imagination
University of Notre Dame Press
1979
Flannery O'Connor
The Habit of Being
Farrar, Straus
Barbara Lewalski
Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric
Princeton University Press