Patterson Prize 2025 (English submission)
Deadline: May 1, 2025
Prize: $500 USD and publication in Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 36, no. 2

The award is named after Yolanda Astarita Patterson, one of the founding editors of Simone de Beauvoir Studies and Editor in Chief of the journal for more than thirty years (1985-2016). The Patterson Prize is awarded annually to a work that demonstrates excellence in writing while also embodying modes of thought and expression characteristic of Beauvoir’s oeuvre.

Hallmarks of Beauvoir’s writing include a capacity to speak to the most pressing issues of our time; rigorous thinking that attends to the complexity and ambiguity of lived experience; a remarkable openness to new ideas; detailed attention to marginalized voices and first-person accounts of phenomena; the capacity to utilize multiple modes of expression; and a courageous insistence on challenging oppression in all its forms. The Patterson Prize Committee invites submissions from authors writing from any cultural, disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and stylistic perspective. We especially invite submissions on topics relevant to Beauvoir’s legacy such as gender and sexuality, race and culture, literature, existentialism, global politics, and others.

Winning articles represent original and cutting-edge work; term papers, papers that discuss basic understandings of Beauvoir’s views, and papers that do not reflect an awareness of previously published literature in Beauvoir studies will not be considered. We encourage authors to read the winning texts from prior years, as well as other articles published in Simone de Beauvoir Studies to gain a sense of the quality and originality expected of winning submissions.

Eligibility:
Any work of previously unpublished writing that has been authored by individuals at any stage of their careers who have not published a monograph in the area of submission at the time of submission. (For example, authors who submit an academic article cannot have published an academic monograph).

Submissions should not exceed 8000 words including references and they should follow SdBS style described in the Author Guide).

More information about Yolanda Astarita Patterson and the history of the Patterson Prize can be found here.

All questions regarding the 2025 Patterson Prize should be addressed to editor-in-chief Claudia Bouliane: sdbs.journal@gmail.com.

Patterson Prize Winners
2024: Aya Nakamura, “L’engagement au féminin: Beauvoir parmi les écrivaines de sa génération » ( SdBS, 35.1-2)
2023: Anna Cornelia Ploug, “Mermaid Dialectics. The Concrete Method of The Second Sex” ( SdBS, 34.2)
2022: Esther Demoulin, “‘Qui gagne perd.’ Simone de Beauvoir et le couple littéraire” ( SdBS 33.2)
2021: Mickaëlle Provost, “Un existentialisme transatlantique : penser la pluralité des oppressions à partir de Simone de Beauvoir” ( SdBS 32.2)
2021: Anne van Leeuwen, “Useless Mouths: Value, Women’s Work and the Struggle against Exploitation” ( SdBS 32.2)