A literary award is an award presented to an author who has written a particularly lauded piece or body of work. There are awards for forms of writing ranging from poetry to novels. Many awards are also dedicated to a certain genre of fiction or non-fiction writing (such as science fiction or politics). There are also awards dedicated to works in individual languages, eg. the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spanish) and the Camões Prize (Portuguese). Most literary awards come with a corresponding award ceremony.
Some of the most notable literary prizes include the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Man Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the Whitbread Awards, the Neustadt Prize and the Hugo Awards.
In recent years, some media corporations have sponsored new literary prizes, including the Quill Awards, which were first awarded in 2005 and The Ireland Funds AWB Vincent Literary Award in 2000.
There are also spoof awards, such as The Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, and the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction and Lyttle Lytton Contests, which are both given to deliberately bad sentences.