Elizabeth Spencer has won many awards in her lifetime. She is a five-time recipient of the O. Henry prize The Voice at the Back Door for short fiction. While considered a Southern writer, Spencer lived in Italy and Canada for many years and many of her stories take place in those countries, including her best-known work, Light in the Piazza. In 1952 she got a recognition award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1953 she received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship Award. In 1956-1957 she received the Kenyon Review Fiction Fellowship and the First Rosenthal Award. In 1960 she received the McGraw-Hill Fiction Fellowship Award. In 1962 she received the Donnelly Fellowship, Bryn Mawr College. In 1968 she received the Bellamann Award. In 1983 she received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Award of Merit Medal for the Short Story. In 1985 she was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1988 she received the National Endowment for the Arts Senior Fellowship in Literature Grant. Then in 1992 she received the Salem Award for Distinction in Letters from Salem College and the John Dos Passos Award for Literature. In 1994 she received the North Carolina Governor's Award for Literature. She was the Vice-Chancellor for the Charter Member Fellowship of Southern Writers from 1993 to 1997.

More of her many awards include the J. William Corrington Award for fiction and the Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award for fiction in 1997. In 1998 she received the Fortner Award for Literature. In 1999 she received the Mississippi State Library Award for non-fiction. In 2001 she received the Cleanth Brooks Medal for achievement awarded by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 2002 she received the Thomas Wolfe Award for Literature given by UNC-Chapel Hill and the Morgan Foundation and was also inducted into the North Carolina Hall of Fame.

See photos of celebrities before they hit the big-time.