The phrase "distinguished prize" is correct and usable in written English.
It is typically used to refer to an award that is held in high esteem or honor because of its prestige. For example, "The Nobel Peace Prize is a distinguished prize that is given each year for accomplishments in the field of world peace and reconciliation."
Dr. Wall was just awarded the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, a distinguished prize that comes with $200,000 that she says plans to use for her research.
The writing is beautiful and the emotion rich on every page; reading it you sink into love and the kind of feelings you rarely, if ever, experience in fiction today, still less in a work that has won a distinguished prize for non‑fiction.
A tradition of finding new voices in children's fiction before the rest of the world is aware of them has distinguished the prize since it was founded in 1967.
Responding to being awarded the distinguished Shakespeare prize, Greene used the occasion to extol the writers and artists for whom he had the most respect, those who by their calling were "troublers of the poor world's peace".
It was the first time that this coveted literary prize had distinguished a Portuguese author.
Since its establishment in 1996, the Hugo Boss Prize has distinguished itself from other art awards because it has no restrictions on nationality or age.
The guidelines offered by the prize's administrators — "distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life" — are so general as to be useless, but a glance at previous winners gives a pretty good sense of what those terms mean to the committee that awards (or, ahem, withholds) the Pulitzer each year.
A Booker winner, a Whitbread winner, a Pulitzer winner and a Commonwealth prize winner go head to head for this year's Orange Broadband prize on a shortlist distinguished by its calibre and geographical breadth.
(Lauterbur won the Nobel Prize in 2003; Damadian's prize that year was the Knights of Vartan Man of the Year award for distinguished Armenian Americans).
He distinguished himself there, too, won the prestigious Elliot prize and went on to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was the Elton exhibitioner.
In 1887, with a little string-pulling by Grigorovich, the short story collection At Dusk (V Sumerkakh) won Chekhov the coveted Pushkin Prize "for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth".
