One of the biggest events on the Black literary calendar is the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, presented each year by the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation. Now in their third year, the awards honor the highest achievements of Black authors as part of the foundation’s mission to encourage young Black writing talent. They’re especially significant because they’re among the few accolades that come from a Black literary organization.
This year’s fiction winners were Mat Johnson’s Hunting in Harlem (Bloomsbury, 2003) and, for debut fiction, Purple Hibiscus (Algonquin Books, 2003) by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Among the other nominees were Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks for her debut novel Getting Mother’s Body (Random House, 2003), and Edward P. Jones for The Known World (Amistad, 2003).