The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Irish Book Awards were announced last week, both recognizing books by U.K. authors. In London, Orange Prize finalist Amy Sackville won the Rhys Prize, given for a work by a writer under thirty-five, for her novel, The Still Point (Portobello Books), and in Ireland, native Dubliner Emma Donoghue won the Novel of the Year prize at the Irish Book Awards for her best-selling novel Room (Picador, 2010) , which earlier this month took the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in Canada and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The judges for the Rhys Prize, which awarded Sackville five thousand pounds (approximately $7,800), were critic Claire Allfree; Bidisha, who debuted on the literary scene at age sixteen with the novel Seahorses; and poet Maura Dooley.

Donoghue, whose book was shortlisted for Novel of the Year along with Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (Scribner, 2009), Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light (Harville Secker, 2010), and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (Random House, 2009), was determined the winner of the Irish Book Award by public voting. Her novel received nearly thirty thousand nods.

In the video below, Donoghue discusses how she approached writing the child protagonist of her winning book.

The Hurston-Wright Foundation, established twenty years ago to promote and encourage writers of African descent, presented its 2010 Legacy Awards last week.

Joining a list of Legacy alumni that includes Pulitzer Prize winners Junot Díaz and Edward P. Jones, MacArthur "Genius" fellow Edwidge Danticat, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist Uwem Akpan, are this year's winners, Rita Dove (also a Pulitzer winner) and Haki Madhubuti, who shared the poetry award, and fiction writer Percival Everett.

Dove received the honor for her collection Sonata Mulattica (Norton, 2009), inspired by the life of George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, the biracial violinist who in 1803 premiered Beethoven's "Kreutzer" sonata in Vienna with the composer's accompaniment on piano. The poet "is concerned equally with the status of musicians in a world of precarious patronage," according to a review in the New Yorker, "and with 'the radiant web' of music itself." (A poem from the collection is available on the New Yorker online.)

Madhubuti won for his collection Liberation Narratives: New and Collected Poems 1966–2009 (Third World Press, 2009). A pivotal figure in the Black Arts Movement, Madhubuti is the founder of Third World Press and established the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University, where he had also directed the MFA in creative writing program. He resigned from his work at the university earlier this year.

Everett was honored for his novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier (Graywolf Press, 2009), which follows a character named Not Sidney Poitier on what the Believer calls "journeys through the minefields of American expectation, ugliness, and absurdity" accompanied by "a cadre of beautifully sketched characters, including [Ted] Turner and a rotund professor of 'Nonsense Philosophy' named Percival Everett."

Nonfiction writer Robin D. G. Kelley also took home an award for his book Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009).

Each writer received a statuette and five hundred dollars, a prize amount that is revised yearly based on funds raised for the occasion (in the early years of the award, created in 2002, the purse was ten thousand dollars), and the authors were feted at a restaurant in Washington, D.C.

For poets interested in seeking a Web venue for their work, online journal Gemini Magazine, which holds annual competitions for short stories and flash fiction, is now accepting entries for its inaugural poetry prize.

The winner, selected by editor David Bright, will receive one thousand dollars and publication in the February 2011 issue of Gemini.

Poets may submit as many poems as they wish, with an entry fee of five dollars for every three pieces sent (electronically or via snail mail). The deadline for entries is December 31.

Full competition guidelines are on Gemini's contest page, and the most recent issue is available on the magazine's front page. For more on the magazine's philosophy and aesthetic, check out two interviews with editor David Bright, on Essential Writers and Duotrope.