The Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award is an American literary prize given by the Tulsa Library Trust in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It is given every year to an author who is well-known around the world and has created an important collection of writings that helped shape the world of writing and books.

History of the award

The Helmerich Award was first given in 1985 with a cash prize of $5,000. By 2006, the prize had grown to $40,000 in cash and a special crystal book with the winner’s name engraved on it. All winners to date have been writers who write in English.

The award is named after Peggy V. Helmerich, a well-known library supporter in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the wife of Walter Helmerich III, a Tulsa oil businessman. Before marrying Walter, Peggy was known as Peggy Dow and worked as an actress. She is best known for playing Nurse Kelly in the 1950 movie Harvey, which starred James Stewart, and for appearing in the 1951 film Bright Victory alongside Arthur Kennedy, an actor who was nominated for an Academy Award.

The first person honored with the award was Norman Cousins, a writer and editor for Saturday Review of Literature. The event’s theme was “The Salutary Aspects of Laughter.” In 1997, John Hope Franklin, a respected African-American historian, became the first and only person from Oklahoma to win the award. While in Tulsa to accept it, Franklin spoke about his childhood experiences with racial segregation and his father’s work as a lawyer after the 1921 Tulsa race riot.

In 2004, 88-year-old Arthur Miller was first announced as the honoree but later declined the award because he was too ill to attend the ceremony in December. He passed away two months later. David McCullough, who had won the award in 1995, took Miller’s place as a speaker at the event and later returned his prize money to the library.

The following year, Tony Hillerman, an Oklahoma native, was initially chosen as the honoree but was unable to accept due to illness. He would have been the second Oklahoma native to win the award. Hillerman was replaced by John Grisham. Library Journal reported that Grisham donated the prize money to help people affected by Hurricane Katrina and used the event to gather information for his book The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, which describes the story of an Oklahoma man who was wrongly convicted of murder. A Virginia newspaper described the Helmerich Award as the “best literary award you’ve never heard of.”

The 2017 honoree was Richard Ford, a novelist.