Humanitas Prize

The Humanitas Prize is an award for film and television writing intended to promote human dignity, meaning, and freedom. It began in 1974 with Father Ellwood "Bud" Kieser—also the founder of Paulist Productions—but is generally not seen as specifically directed toward religious cinema or TV. The prize is distinguished from similar honors for screenwriters in that a large cash award, between $10,000 and $25,000, accompanies each prize. Journalist Barbara Walters once said, "What the Nobel Prize is to literature and the Pulitzer Prize is to journalism, the Humanitas Prize has become for American television."

History
Beginning as primarily a television award, the first Humanitas Prize winners were announced on the Today Show. Kieser, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Abernathy announced the first winners in 1975. At that time, the awards were divided into three categories, based on program length (30, 60, or 90 minutes and longer); these lengths tend to correspond to comedies, dramas, and telefilms or miniseries, to the extent that some articles refer to the categories by those names.

The present-day award system is broken up into Prime Time TV 90 minute, Prime Time TV 60 minute, Prime Time TV 30 minute, Children's Live Action, Children's Animation, Feature Film, and Sundance Feature Film categories, with additional awards that include the Angell Comedy Fellowship for film-school students. The fellowship was started after David Angell and his wife, Lynn Angell, were killed in the crash of Flight 11 in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Kieser Award, a kind of lifetime achievement award, was established after Keiser's death in late 2000. The Special Award category is irregularly given, usually to writers of a news or documentary program, which otherwise are excluded from the prize; to date the longest period without the special award was the 11-year period between 1995 and 2006.