While few journalists could ever rival the late Vanity Fair correspondent Christopher Hitchens’s impressive intellect and prolific body of work, a new prize, created by the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation, will honor his legacy.

The foundation, created in 2014 by attorney Dennis Ross and writer and art historian Victoria Ross, is an educational nonprofit operated in support of public debate, fostering discussion on topics of current or historical importance, and promoting up-and-coming artists working in theater, film, music, and the visual arts. The Hitchens Prize will be awarded to an author or journalist whose work “reflects a commitment to free expression and inquiry, a range and depth of intellect, and a willingness to pursue the truth without regard to personal or professional consequence.”

The foundation is currently accepting nominations for the Hitchens Prize, which includes an award of $50,000. Nominations—welcome through April 13, 2015—should be sent to hitchensprize@dvrf.org, and should include the nominee’s name, a brief statement of their qualifications, and citations of their published work. The submission date was chosen in honor of what would have been Hitchens’ 66th birthday. The prize will be awarded at a public ceremony in New York City, where the winner will be determined by a selection committee that includes some of Hitchens’s close friends, such as V.F. editor Graydon Carter, and the writer Christopher Buckley.

Over the course of his nearly two decades as a correspondent for Vanity Fair, Hitchens was not exactly a fervent proponent of prizes and awards himself (he once wrote that “in the atmosphere created by the prize cult, it is forgotten that a canon of literature is made up of works and books, not ribbons and awards.”) However, the foundation intends both the prize and the award ceremony to celebrate and draw public attention to the values that marked Christopher Hitchens’s life and career: freedom of speech, the necessity of inquiry, and the importance of civil, passionate discourse and debate. And though he may have been wary of accolades, many of Christopher Hitchens’s friends and admirers will be glad to see his contributions celebrated in the encouragement of others.

“Were Christopher not the author of the imperishable God Is Not Great,” says Buckley, “I would be sorely tempted to say that he must be smiling in heaven. Certainly he will have the recipients of future Hitchens Prizes smiling down here on earth.”