The Donner Institute for Research in Religious and Cultural History (or The Donner Institute, Swedish: Donnerska Institutet) is a private institute in Finland maintained by the Åbo Akademi University.^[1] The Institute was founded in 1959 with an extensive donation by Uno and Olly Donner.^[1] It hosts the largest special library on Comparative Religion in the Nordic countries, supports research in the area of the Institute through grants, and organizes conferences and seminars.^[1][2] It publishes the journal Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis,^[3] and the journal Approaching Religion.^[4]

In 2010 the Donner Institute established an annual prize for "outstanding research into religion conducted at a Nordic university" to researchers in the field of religious studies for a significant and relatively new published monograph.^[2]

The recipients of this award have been:

2010: Ferdinando Sardella of University of Gothenburg, Sweden, for Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati: the context and significance of a modern Hindu personalist (2010)

2011: Olle Sundström of Umeå University, for "The Wild Reindeer is Itself the Same as a God": "Gods" and "Spirits" in Soviet Ethnographers' Descriptions of Samoyedic World Views [Swedish: Vildrenen är själv detsamma som en gud": "gudar" och "andar" i sovjetiska etnografers beskrivningar av samojediska världsåskådningar] (2008)

2012: Niklas Foxeus of Stockholm University, Sweden, for : The Buddhist World Emperor's Mission: Millenarian Buddhism in Postcolonial Burma (2011)

2013: Jessica Moberg of Södertörn University, Sweden, for Piety, Intimacy and Mobility. A Case Study of Charismatic Christianity in Present-day Stockholm (2013)