The award is presented for works in Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French by writers from Latin America and the Caribbean.

A category for children's literature was added in 1975, and works by Caribbean authors in English and French have been eligible in all genres of fiction since 1976 and 1978, respectively.

Scholars and writers who have won the prize include Edward Brathwaite, Humberto Costantini, Beatriz Doumerc,[4] Eduardo Galeano, Renato Prada Oropeza, Susana Rotker, Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, Françoise Perus, Beatriz González-Stephan, Anthony Phelps, Luis Britto García and Abel Sierra Madero.

Among them are many recipients whose work was virtually unknown and who are now widely read and translated into many languages, such as Jorge Enrique Adoum and Roque Dalton.

The Casa de las Américas Prize has been credited with attracting international attention to Latin American literature, and with contributing to a major literary renaissance that resulted in the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to writers such as Pablo Neruda in 1971 and Gabriel García Márquez in 1982.