This came up in a conversation my spouse and I were having recently. Sure, a lot of writers want to win awards and receive accolades for their creations, but are there examples of writers rejecting an award? I tried to Google this, but only found lists of famous writers who got rejection letters early in their careers.
by Gold_Cover2256
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Boris Pasternak refused the Nobel Prize in Literature that the CIA got him for Doctor Zhivago because he didn’t want the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to murder him.
I sadly can’t remember the names of either, but two come to mind.
The widower of an author who received a (Nebula?) award after her death went to the ceremony to get the posthumous award for his late wife and rejected it, stating that giving her a posthumous award was an empty gesture rather than giving her anything while she was alive. Some people – who had no relationship to his wife – are still bitter at him for doing so.
More recently, while AFAICT you cannot reject a Hugo, one of this year’s winners has scrubbed her win from her website and had to ask her publisher to remove references to her win in her upcoming book, because she felt she would not have won if not for all the nominations that were deemed ineligible.