Award-winning novelist, Alice Hoffman, granted a $1,000 annual prize to fiction writers featured in Ploughshares, a literary magazine based at Emerson College.

Winners of the prize will be determined by the Ploughshares editorial staff each spring, beginning in 2012. Hoffman has been a board member of the magazine for two years and was a guest editor in 2004. She will be guest editing the Winter 2011 edition of the magazine and hopes the $1,000 prize will inspire young writers.

“Ploughshares is a wonderful vehicle for new writers, so I’m thrilled to be able to create an opportunity to bring attention to the remarkably talented writers featured in the magazine each year,” Hoffman said in a press release.

This year, the magazine will celebrate its 40th anniversary. It has been based at Emerson since 1989 and is published every April, August, and December.