| Year | Title | Publisher | Prize Amount | Judge |
| 2004 | Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anonymous | Knopf | $1,000 | Robert Bly |
William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927. He attended Princeton University on a scholarship, where he was a classmate of Galway Kinnell, and studied poetry with the critic R. P. Blackmur, and his teaching assistant, John Berryman. After graduating in 1948, he spent an additional year at Princeton studying Romance language.