Booker Prize winners celebrate new UEA scholarship in honour of Eve Smith
By: Communications
Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright and Ben Okri celebrate new scholarship in honour of Eve Smith
The Booker Prize Foundation and UEA announce new creative writing scholarship in the name of former BPF Company Secretary
Today, Tuesday, 6 October, the Booker Prize Foundation (BPF) announces a new creative writing scholarship at the University of East Anglia (UEA), in honour of the Booker Prize Foundation’s former Company Secretary Eve Smith. The first Eve Smith Scholarship will be awarded next summer, for the 2027-2028 academic year.
Eve Smith, who would have been 68 today, served as the charity’s Company Secretary for 18 years, in which time she was dedicated to expanding access to great literature and helped to establish a number of initiatives, including the Booker Prizes prison reading programme, Books Unlocked, and a book-gifting programme across UK universities. She died of ovarian cancer in February.
This is the second scholarship the Booker Prize Foundation has funded in partnership with UEA. Smith was instrumental in setting up the original Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship 17 years ago and took a devoted interest in its recipients and their work. After her death, the Trustees and Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation worked with the university to create another scholarship in her honour. The original UEA Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship remains, in addition to the new one in Smith’s name.
Several of the recipients of the original UEA Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship – who include the authors D W Wilson, Sharlene Teo, Stephen Buoro, Alake Pilgrim and Daniel Wiles – have gone on to publish books and garner critical acclaim, including being nominated for or winning the Nero Book Awards, the Betty Trask Prize and the BBC National Short Story Award. They have been praised by writers including Hilary Mantel and Ian Rankin, and have been featured among the Observer's annual best debut novelists.
The Eve Smith Scholarship is open to any student, from anywhere in the world, who has been offered a place on the University of East Anglia’s prestigious postgraduate course in Prose Fiction. The scholarship covers full tuition plus a significant contribution to living expenses and includes visa support where necessary. UEA creative writing graduates include past Booker Prize winners Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright and Ian McEwan.
Further reading on thebookerprizes.com: ‘How UEA’s Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship nurtures the next generation of authors’
Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 1989 Booker Prize and the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, says:
"I was fortunate to work with Eve several times on her Booker educational outreach projects. So quiet and modest on the surface, she was passionately determined to make literature more accessible, more enticing, more explorable for young people. She’d be thrilled the new UEA scholarship bears her name; even more thrilled that a new generation of promising writers will be given this wonderful opportunity to explore in depth their talent and their calling."
Anne Enright, winner of the 2007 Booker Prize, says:
"In 1986, I got a small scholarship to study Creative Writing at UEA from the British Council. The money caught me at the best time: it put wind in my sails, just as I was leaving the harbour of home. I suppose you could say it changed my life. A scholarship like this is a brilliantly timed investment in one person's talent and our shared cultural future."
Ben Okri, winner of the 1991 Booker Prize, comments:
"Eve Smith worked tirelessly for the excellence of the Booker prizes. It is fitting that a Booker scholarship should be in her honour, as she gave the best of herself to helping the prize become what it is. That the scholarship should go towards enriching the art of writing would have delighted her no end."
Stephen Kelman, shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize, adds:
"Eve did so much to support and encourage others, in so many different walks of life. She certainly did that for me, and I was sure to let her know how grateful I was to her. She was someone who always looked for the best in others, and helped them to express the best of themselves. Everyone was family to her, because her love of people was the starting point and the centre of everything she did and believed in. This scholarship reflects that love, and will ensure it has a fitting legacy."
2018-19 UEA Booker Prize Foundation Scholar Stephen Buoro, author of The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa, says:
"I first met Eve Smith in 2018 after receiving the UEA Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship. At the time I was a 25-year-old writer and a new migrant to the UK. Eve was friendly and incredibly kind to me, and I will always be grateful for her guidance and encouragement. I am thrilled that the Eve Smith Scholarship is being established at UEA in her honour. As a former scholar, I fully appreciate how transformative this opportunity would be to emerging writers. In my case, receiving the UEA Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship changed my life. I am sure Eve would be proud of this new scholarship, and would like to thank everyone who has contributed to it."
Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation says:
"Eve was beloved, and loyal in a way that few of us could match. Originally a lawyer, she had a heartfelt sense of justice and always found creative ways to conjure it. Eve’s work at the Booker Prize Foundation set in motion all of its education and outreach programmes, and laid the foundations for its charitable purpose overall. Her interest in young people’s minds was instinctive; her capacity to believe in others was awe-inspiring. I can think of no more fitting way to honour her than to create opportunities for writers of the future, whatever their country of origin."
Jean McNeil, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, adds:
"Eve Smith was integral to UEA's scholarship with the Booker Prize Foundation in every way. The students who held this award over the years often came to know Eve very well, and she was warm and supportive of them, both personally and as writers of exceptional talent and promise. Creative Writing at UEA holds Eve very dear in our memories, and we are especially gratified to have an award that will ensure that her legacy lives on in a scholarship that will bring more writers of all backgrounds and nationalities to study with us in Norwich."
Henry Sutton, Professor of Creative Writing and Director of Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, comments:
"Eve Smith always conducted Booker Prizes business in such a calm, confident and insightful way. Every encounter with her was a joy. The Eve Smith Scholarship at UEA will ensure such attributes will continue by enabling exceptional writers to find their true voices and places in the world of books and well beyond."
Linda and Caroline Smith, Eve Smith’s sisters, on the legacy of the scholarship:
"The Booker Prize and its dedicated team were very special to Eve, and the thought of an Eve Smith Scholarship being offered to a budding new author is the most fitting tribute to her work, which she tirelessly dedicated to the literary world. She would have loved that a scholarship in her name will empower and help the selected students to shine, and she will no doubt be watching over with a sense of honour and appreciation."
How to apply for the Eve Smith Scholarship
Students who have been accepted onto the UEA postgraduate Prose Fiction course and are interested in applying for the Eve Smith Scholarship should visit the UEA Scholarships Finder or access the Eve Smith Scholarship page directly.
About Eve Smith
Evelyn Isobel Smith was born in High Wycombe on 6 October 1958, her parents’ third wedding anniversary. Her sister Linda was 20 months older; her sister Caroline arrived five years later. Their father was an airline pilot, first with the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), then with British Airways and later Concorde; their mother was among the first female stewardesses working for BOAC in the late 40s (the couple met in a swimming pool in Trinidad). The family – a close-knit, fun-loving group with a strong moral compass – moved to Sussex soon after Eve’s birth, and became very involved in their local community.
During the late Fifties and Sixties – a period when international travel was glamorous and rare – the Smith family made use of their staff discount at the airline to spend time abroad, with stints in Hawaïi and Canada, and regular trips to the Caribbean. These experiences would grant Eve a lifelong wanderlust, and an unquenchable interest in other cultures.
She attended secondary school at Horsham High School for Girls, a grammar school staffed by trailblazing women, and one of few girls’ schools to play cricket during the summer term. These years embedded in Eve a love of that sport, which, along with literature, became an enduring passion.
At Aberystwyth University she read Law, and afterwards practised as a barrister before cross-qualifying as a solicitor in the late Eighties. At Lovells and then at Titmuss, Sainer & Webb she specialised in commercial and contract law. She was introduced to the nonprofit world through a colleague, and became a trustee of Breakthrough Breast Cancer at a time when that organisation was producing innovative, highly visible campaigns – including ‘Fashion Targets Breast Cancer’, which in the mid-Nineties raised over £16 million in the UK alone. At that point she was persuaded by the pioneering lawyer Stephen Lloyd to join him at Bates Wells Braithwaite, a law firm known for its work with charities, and she soon became a Partner there.
It was this work that had her heart, and after five years at Bates Wells Eve made the mindful decision to leave the law. The Booker Prize Foundation (BPF) had been recently formed – Booker Ltd had given way to the Man Group as sponsors of the Booker Prize and it had become necessary to form a charity at its core. Eve’s position as the Booker Prize Foundation’s Company Secretary became the lynchpin in a portfolio career in the Third Sector. From then on she devoted her energy and expertise to causes she truly cared about – also becoming, variously, legal advisor, Company Secretary or trustee of Hospice UK, the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and the Bates Wells Foundation.
At the BPF, Eve took great pleasure in reading the Booker Prize longlist (she would always start with the longest book, to make sure she had time to read them all) and in meeting the authors. ‘I’m not important,’ she would announce by way of introduction, ‘but I am the woman who writes the cheques!’
She was important. Eve oversaw the governance of the BPF: her legal background and financial acumen were indispensable, and her personal qualities made her in many ways the foundation’s guiding light. She was, as people who worked with her in a range of organisations have attested, curious, mischievous, modest, compassionate, principled and full of humanity. She had a strong pastoral side, and was the person colleagues had recourse to when a situation required a wise weighing of things.
Eve was instrumental in setting up the International Booker Prize and in overseeing its modification. She set in motion the charity’s programme in prisons, Books Unlocked, and helped to set up both the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship at the University of East Anglia and a widespread programme in universities across the UK. (She retired from the Booker Prize Foundation in 2023.) In 2007 she was among the steering group of trustees who founded the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF). She travelled frequently to the Middle East, annually and sensitively expanding her knowledge of the Arab world, and remained the organisation’s Company Secretary until her death.
From 2017 to 2024 she was a trustee of the Bates Wells Foundation, where she oversaw an award named after her late colleague Stephen Lloyd, who had died in a boating accident. The Stephen Lloyd Award supports early-stage projects that have the potential to achieve sustainable social change.
For over 20 years, Eve worked as legal advisor and de facto Company Secretary for Hospice UK, where she is remembered by the Chief Executive, Toby Porter, as ‘arguably the greatest ever hire in the history of our charity’. For a modest retainer out of sync with her expertise, she played a vital part in two major reviews of the charity’s constitution.
Eve was devoted to her sisters and to her nephew, Daniel, as well as to friends she retained throughout her life. She was culturally omnivorous, travelled often, went on long walking holidays. After treatment for ovarian cancer in late 2025 she experienced a sudden decline, and eventually received care from a sector she had spent two decades supporting, in close proximity to something she loved. She died on 4 February 2026, surrounded by family and friends, in a hospice overlooking Lord’s cricket ground. In the words of her sister Linda, "She had enough in her life for most people five times over."
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