The Leon Forrest Prose Awards is an annual competition through which The Guild Complex honors the memory of Chicago novelist, essayist, and educator Leon Forrest (1937-1997) by acknowledging promising new work by emerging and established prose writers in fiction and non-fiction from Chicago and throughout Illinois.

The contest culminates in the annual Leon Forrest Prose Awards event, a public recognition of literary achievement at which semi-finalists in each category, selected by accomplished writers invited by The Guild to be guest judges, read their work, the winners are chosen by audience ballot, and a cash prize of $500 is awarded in each category.

About Leon Forrest

Leon Forrest (1937 - 1997) was a Chicago author of fiction and essays, whose long career as a writer was celebrated not only in Chicago, but with national renown. His work is dense, and rich with the vibrancy and darkness of Chicago. Henry Louis Gates called Forrest's Divine Days (1992) "The War and Peace of African-American Literature" and he earned a place on Chicago magazine's list of the Most Important Chicagoans of the 20th Century with what the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame described, upon his induction in 2013, as "stream-of-consciousness writing" that wrestled with "the legacy of slavery."

His novels, some of which are set in a mythical ‘Forrest County' that closely resembles Chicago, document a real place by inventing a fictional one. Two Wings to Veil My Face (1984) won the Society of Midland Authors Award for adult fiction, the DuSable Museum Certificate of Merit and Achievement in Fiction, the Carl Sandburg Award, and the Friends of Literature Prize. Divine Days, his fourth book, won the Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year Award for local fiction.

During his long literary career, Forrest served as president of the Society of Midland Authors, wrote for numerous South Side Chicago newspapers (including the Nation of Islam's Muhammad Speaks, for which he was the last non-Muslim editor,) and published six books. He was a professor at Northwestern University from 1973 until his death in 1997, and served as the head of the African American Studies Department from 1985-1994. This award honors the work and the memory of a great writer whose gifts have not diminished with time, but rather whose work has grown in estimation and relevance, with the hope that his legacy will inspire new generations of Chicago writers.