The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) is the "senior literary organisation in Britain". It was founded in 1820 by King George IV, in order to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". The society's first president was Thomas Burgess, Bishop of St David's (who was later appointed Bishop of Salisbury). There are 450 fellows of the Royal Society of Literature (generally 14 new fellows are named annually), who earn the privilege of using the post-nominal letters FRSL.
Past fellows include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, and Arthur Koestler. Present fellows include Chinua Achebe, Antonia Fraser, Athol Fugard, Doris Lessing, V. S. Naipaul, Peter Dickinson, Tom Stoppard, Helen Dunmore and J. K. Rowling. A newly created fellow inscribes his or her name on the official roll using either Byron's pen or Dickens's quill.
The society publishes an annual magazine, The Royal Society of Literature Review, and administers a number of literary prizes and awards, including the Ondaatje Prize, the Jerwood Awards and the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize. From time to time it confers the honour and title of Companion of the Royal Society of Literature to writers of particular note. Likewise the award of the Benson Medal for lifetime service in the field of literature is in its gift.
The RSL also runs a membership scheme and offers a varied programme of monthly lectures to members and their guests.
The Society is a cultural tenant at London's palatial Somerset House.
Read more about Royal Society Of Literature: Presidents, Current Fellows
Famous quotes containing the words royal, society and/or literature:
“High from the summit of a craggy cliff,
Hung o’er the deep, such as amazing frowns
On utmost Kilda’s shore, whose lonely race
Resign the setting sun to Indian worlds,
The royal eagle draws his vigorous young”
—James Thomson (1700–1748)
“The war shook down the Tsardom, an unspeakable abomination, and made an end of the new German Empire and the old Apostolic Austrian one. It ... gave votes and seats in Parliament to women.... But if society can be reformed only by the accidental results of horrible catastrophes ... what hope is there for mankind in them? The war was a horror and everybody is the worse for it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)