Awards and arts prize winners: quick links
RA Summer Exhibition Awards
The Royal Academy has announced the prize winners for its 2025 Summer Exhibition that closed this weekend after a busy showing. The annual exhibition is a unique celebration of contemporary art and architecture, providing a vital platform and support for the artistic community with a number of prizes for outstanding works.
The prestigious Charles Wollaston Award, worth £35,000, is one of the most significant art prizes in the country and is presented to the ‘most distinguished work’ in the exhibition. This year’s recipient is Sikelela Owen for her work Knitting. Previous winners of the Wollaston Award include Tracey Emin, Kara Walker, Yinka Shonibare, Anselm Kiefer and Chantal Joffe.
The £10,000 AXA Art Prize UK 2025 is awarded to an outstanding work of figurative art in the exhibition. Miho Sato is the winner for her striking artwork Windy Day 2 that ‘captivated the judges with its dynamic portrayal of movement and a unique interpretation of the interplay between nature and human experience.’
Zatorski + Zatorski received the £10,000 Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture for their astonishing sculpture I, an installation of 101 taxidermied white rat pelts, each lined with 24 ct gold to their interior. Collaborative artists and life partners Z+Z are preoccupied with notions of mortality, belief and the soul.
The British Institution Fund Award for Students was established to promote excellence in the arts through the awarding of prizes to students. Work is assessed across a comprehensive range of creative disciplines from painting to architecture. This year’s winner of the £5,000 prize is Winsome Yuen for the Superstition, a Giclée print.
Steven Dixon takes home this year’s Hugh Casson Drawing Prize for Gunshot 1.The £5,000 award is for an original work on paper in any medium, where the emphasis is clearly on drawing. Judges: Carola
The £5,000 Sunny Dupree Family Award for a Woman Artist, open to both painting and sculpture, was presented to Anousha Payne for A Temporary Shift, Twin (Self Portrait as a Horse).
Frances Featherstone is the 2025 recipient of the £5,000 Maire Ragnhild Hollingsworth Prize for Oil Painting for the oil on linen painting Motherly Loves.
Trevor Price takes home the £5,000 Viking Prize for Print for his woodcut Rock ‘n’ Roll. And Emmanuel Awuni won the £2,500 Arts Club Award foran artist aged 35 or under for Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize Shortlist:
The National Portrait Gallery has announced the shortlist for the 2025 Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize. This prestigious international competition celebrates the very best in contemporary portrait photography.
Entrants were encouraged to interpret ‘portrait’ in its widest sense, with ‘photography focused on portraying people with an emphasis on their identity as individuals’. The selected photographs will be displayed in the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize 2025 exhibition opening in November.
Chosen from 2,054 entrants, the four shortlisted photographers are: Hollie Fernando for Boss Morris from the series Hoydenish; Luan Davide Gray for We Dare to Hug from the series Call Me by Your Name; Byron Mohammad Hamzah for Jaidi Playing from the series Bunga dan Tembok (The Flower and The Wall: The Stateless Youths of Semporna); and Martina Holmberg for Mel from the series The Outside of the Inside.
The Prize winner will be awarded £15,000, with £3,000 going to second place and third prize receiving £2,000. A commission to the value of £8,000 will also be awarded to one of the shortlisted photographers to create an artwork that will form part of the world’s largest collection of portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery.
The Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize 2025 will be on display at the National Portrait Gallery from 13 November 2025 to 8 February 2026.
London Art Biennale Awards
The popular London Art Biennale included a wide range of prizes this year. The winner of the £5,000 London Art Biennale Best Work prize was UK artist Alan Macdonald for his oil on linen painting Euphorus.
‘Painting for me is a voyage of discovery,’ says Macdonald. ‘In the beginning, I don’t have a firm idea of what my next painting will ultimately look like, so I just climb aboard for the ride and see what distant shores I might end up on. Euphorus was started during my first spring living in Edinburgh and was influenced by the sense of joy I felt as this beautiful city sprang into life after a very difficult winter.
‘The main character leads the way, gradually revealing herself and that infectious spring energy entered Euphorus, exploding onto the canvas.’
Swedish artist Eric Jung won the £2,000 London Art Biennale Award for Painting for Perhaps it will be, that one day …., an acrylic on canvas work. The £2,000 London Art Biennale Award for Sculpture or Installation went to Lithuanian artist Rimas Metlovas for ECHOES OF 365 – ‘a sculptural meditation on the passage of time, composed of 365 individual drops – each representing a day filled with emotion, memory, and meaning’.
The £2,000 London Art Biennale Award for Works on Paper was presented to UK artist Rebecca Lyne for My Protective Shell, a work of graphite on paper. American artist Toby MacLennan won the £2,000 London Art Biennale Award for Digital Work for The Chorus, a digital artwork on paper. And the World Art Dubai Award, offering the artist complimentary participation in the World Art Dubai Fair was won by UK artist Rebecca Holton for her oil on canvas painting Sometimes it’s hard to stop.
Society of Authors Awards
A quick recap on the 2025 Society of Authors (SOA) awards, where London author Ashani Lewis was the big winner taking home both the Betty Trask Prize and one of the four Somerset Maugham Awards for her novel Winter Animals (Dialogue Books).
Lewis received £14,000 for her double win. The three other Somerset Maugham Awards went to Jo Hamya for The Hypocrite (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, Orion); Jason Okundaye for Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain (Faber & Faber); and Charlotte Shevchenko Knight for Food for the Dead (Jonathan Cape, Vintage).
The ADCI Literary Prize, for authors with disabilities and chronic illnesses, recognises outstanding novels containing a disabled or chronically ill character or characters. Helen Heckety won the ADCI Prize for Alter Ego (Renegade Books, John Murray Press).
Short stories of up to 5,000 words are celebrated in the ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award. This year’s winner was Katie Hale for ‘Raise, or how to break free of the ground, or the Lakeland dialect for slippery is slape and to form it in the mouth requires an act of falling’.
The Cholmondeley Awards are given for contributions to poetry with five winners each receiving £1,680. This year’s winners are James Byrne, Jane Commane, Annie Freud, John Lyons, and Dr Karen McCarthy Woolf.
The Eric Gregory Awards are presented for a collection of poems by a poet under 30. This year there were six winners each taking home £4,725. The winners are Tom Bailey for Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses; Sophia Georghiou for Gloria Trillo; Kaycee Hill for Sonic Inheritance; Oluwaseun Olayiwola for Strange Beach; Katie O’Pray for Apricot; and Eric Yip for Exposure.
The Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize is awarded to a UK or Irish writer, or a writer currently resident in those countries, for a novel focusing on the experience of travel away from home. 2025 winner Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents; spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo; and has lived most of his life in London.
He received the Prize for his novel My Friends (Viking Penguin Random House). British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak was also recognised for her novel There are Rivers in the Sky (Viking Penguin Random House).
Tom Newlands received the McKitterick Prize for his book Only Here, Only Now. The McKitterick Prize is awarded for a first novel by a writer over 40. Only Here, Only Now was also a runner-up for the ADCI Prize.
The wonderfully-titled Queen’s Knickers Award is for an outstanding original children’s illustrated book for ages 0-7. It recognises books that strike a quirky, new note and grab the attention of a child, whether in the form of curiosity, amusement, horror or excitement. The award went to writer Tiny Fisscher, illustrator Herma Starreveld, and translator Laura Watkinson for Bird Is Dead (Greystone Kids).
Travelling Scholarships are awarded to British writers to enable engagement with writers abroad. There were five Scholarships this year, each of £7,000, awarded to Sally Bayley; Jasbinder Bilan; Marcus Field; Montenegro Fisher, the collaborative work of poets and artists Luna Montenegro and Adrian Fisher; and Nathalie Olah.
Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award
The prestigious Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award celebrates the very best in contemporary portraiture and is one of the most important platforms for portrait painters today. This year, 46 captivating portraits from around the world were selected for the exhibition.
British artist Moira Cameron won First Prize for her self-portrait A Life Lived. This work is an evolution of one she painted 40 years ago. It shows the artist reclining in a comfortable armchair as an older woman who has lived, observed, and felt deeply.
Her posture conveys quiet fatigue, with shoulders slightly slumped and head tilted in reflection. The lines on her face and the subtle shadows tell a story of time passing and of a life fully experienced. Rather than capturing a single moment in time, the portrait holds a lifetime within it.
The Second Prize was awarded to British oil painter Tim Benson for Cliff, Outreach Worker. The work is a large scale portrait of London outreach worker Clifford Dobbs and was painted from sketches and photographs. Martyn Harris won Third Prize for Memories and Michelle Liu received the Young Artist Award for Kofi.
The free exhibition runs to 12 October 2025 at the National Portrait Gallery (Floor 2)
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