Playboy's Annual Awards

announcing the prize-winning authors, artists and photographers whose contributions were judged by our staff to be the past year's most outstanding

Writing

John Le Carre spent two years in Southeast Asia researching his latest spy thriller, The Honourable Schoolboy. Our prize-winning August excerpt follows Le Carré's British spy-hero through a wobbly flight in a dope-smuggling cargo plane to an opium den during the last days of the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia. (Our hard-pressed Copy Department voted its own award to Le Carré, for the best-researched, best-prepared manuscript ever submitted to Playboy.) Runner-up is Irwin Shaw for our September-October excerpt of Beggarman, Thief, his sequel to the blockbuster Rich Man, Poor Man.

Paul Theroux wins the first of two awards this year, a Playboy first of firsts, so to speak. His Adulterer's Luck (July) is a subtly chilling tale about an Englishman who takes in a wildly beautiful Malay girl, only to discover that she is from a leper colony. Jorge Luis Borges is runner-up with The Other (May), a mystical twist of the déjà vu theme.

Judith Johnson Sherwin's Voyages of a Mile-High Fille de Joie (April) is a delightful feminine retelling of Swift's story of Glumdalclitch and Lemuel Gulliver from Glumdalclitch's point of view. Philip José Farmer takes second with The Henry Miller Dawn Patrol (December), his madcap tale of a horny old fighter pilot's sexual sorties in an old folks' home.

Although it is commonly held that writers and artists require intense starvation to fully develop their respective crafts, we don't subscribe to that theory at all. Which is the why and wherefore behind Playboy's Annual Awards; we feed their muses hard cash in the belief that first-rate creativity should be rewarded with something more than bravos. The award-winning writers in each category will receive $1000 and each runner-up, $500. The winning illustrators will each receive $1000 and the runner-up, $500. The photography awards will be in four categories: $1000 for the best pictorial essay, $1000 for the best Playmate shooting, $500 for the best service feature and $250 for the best black-and-white photograph. And all get the silver medallion pictured here as a remembrance after the money's been spent. Staff members of all three departments had their say on the entries. The voting, admittedly, was accompanied by a great gnashing of teeth, but in the end we came up with the winners. Our congratulations to all.

Asa Baber takes first prize for his poverty-defying leap info the commodities market, from which he returned to pen You've Really Got to Be an Animal (July) and warn us that down in the pits, it's dog eat dog and only the chickens survive. Peter S. Greenberg takes second with Good Night, Sweet Prinze (June), an account of the life and death of Freddie Prinze.

D. Keith Mano, everybody's favorite short person, comes up seven feet tall with Rocky Mountain Hype (March), his cynical cauterization of the Colorado Rockies culture, hitherto universally advertised as the best alternative to our national insanity. Paul Theroux takes his second award, this time as runner-up, with his evocative Bewitched by Older Women (May).

Marshall Brickman, who proved forever that he's a funny man by co-authoring the script of the movie Annie Hall with Woody Allen, wins with The Book of Coasts (February), in which the matter of which coast is culturally supreme is resolved scripturally. Art Buchwald's Down the Seine and Up the Potomac and Jay Cronley's Camping Out (both September) tie for second.

Roy Blount Jr. is our first pick for Chairman Billy, a beer-soaked good-ole-boy profile of our President's irascible, shoot-from-the-mouth brother (November). Clifford Irving, of Howard Hughes hoax fame, takes second for Jailing (November), his biographical recounting of his experiences in the slam. Needless to say, it was a far cry from the pleasures of the isle of Ibiza.

Illustration

Alan Magee was almost reluctant to accept the assignment of illustrating June's Good Night, Sweet Prinze, because, he says, "I thought it had the potential of being vulgar." But much of the 30-year-old Maine resident's work has "a lonely, tragic quality," so he undertook the task. The resulting arrestingly stark water color, his first illustration for Playboy, was judged a winner.

Kathy Calderwood is a fine artist whose work has frequently been exhibited throughout the United States. Recently, she decided to re-enter the commercial-illustration field after a four-year layoff. Her illustration for Paul Theroux's Adulterer's Luck (July) is an acrylic painting that Art Director Arthur Paul says has "a tremendous sense of design and craftsmanship."

Charles Bragg, honored for his illustration of Asa Baber's You've Really Got to Be an Animal (July), is widely known throughout the country as a satirical painter. His work has appeared in such disparate places as the racks of greeting-card stores and the walls of Moscow's Pushkin Fine Arts Museum. His depiction here of the horrors of competition at the commodities market has just the right bite.

Brad Holland has been illustrating our Ribald Classics for a decade. His work has won many awards for Playboy and many of his best Ribald illustrations are permanent pieces in Playboy's touring art show, "Beyond Illustration." His political art appears regularly on the "Op-Ed" page of The New York Times.

Photography

Pompeo Posar wins for his delicious exposition of Patti McGuire, our C.B. Playmate of the Year, in last June's issue. We've received truckloads of appreciative letters on the Pompeo-Patti pictorial, compared with merely bushels of mail about previous Playmate of the Year spreads. Of Posar's photography, Photo Editor Gary Cole says, "It's always relaxed, frank and sexy."

Robert Scott Hooper's award is noteworthy because his portraiture of Debra Jo Fondren (September) was his first Playmate shooting, though he photographed the now-famous pictorial Sex and the Automobile that ran in May 1973. Bob composed Debra's gatefold in his back yard, erecting a screen so that his neighbors couldn't see in. Eat your hearts out, neighbors.

Mario Casilli captured the zany atmosphere created by mimes Shields and Yarnell as they became literally smashed by an assortment of alcoholic desserts pictured in our December issue. Casilli did the offbeat shooting in his Altadena, California, studio--which was once the public library. Mario also shot our precedent-shattering Barbra Streisand cover in October.

Norman Seeff snapped this unusual shot of John Travolta for the February On the Scene. Photography Editor Gary Cole says of Seeff, "Norman deals with the famous in a unique way. He's a true celebrity photographer, as close to the photographer in the movie Blow-Up as you can get. He has this fantastic ability to bring out his subjects as you never saw them before."