We are delighted to announce two winners of the 2025 Simon Dentith Memorial Prize, the Society’s postgraduate essay competition.
First prize goes to Friederike Sachs for her essay ‘Against Popular Realism: Reading Glen James Brown’s Ironopolis (2018) with Raymond Williams.’ Friederike graduated with an MA in English Literatures from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2024. She wins £250 and a year’s membership of the Society. Her essay staged a reading of two important debut novels by working-class writers – Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (2020) and Glen James Brown’s Ironopolis (2018) – against a rubric developed from Raymond Williams, his theory of a ‘balanced realism’ that could coordinate individual and social dynamics to render critically and convincingly a ‘knowable community.’ The committee praised the painstaking reconstruction of Williams’ thinking and the critical readings of the fiction. The essay is a powerful vindication of Williams’ belief in the experimentalism required to do realism right.
Second prize goes to Alexander Curtis for his essay ‘Periodizing the ’70s: Class Tensions in Britain at the Level of Literary Form.’ Alex is studying for a PhD in English at the University of Nottingham; he wins £150 and a year’s membership of the Society. His essay impressed the committee with its attempt to re-narrate the dominant cultural narrative of Britain in the 1970s by foregrounding, instead of class-privileged writers like J.G. Ballard and Doris Lessing, a working-class countercanon: William McIlvanney’s Docherty (1975), David Storey’s Saville (1976). The contrast reveals a split at the level of literary genre between middle-class narratives of crisis and decline, and working-class returns to history and community. As H. Bruce Franklin cautioned at the time, we may do well not to place too much credit on the decade’s apocalyptic visions: some writers mistake the end of their world for the end of the world. Fredric Jameson has since riffed on the line, how it becomes easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Which is why, says Curtis, we must remember what other genres were and are available.
We are excited to report that both authors will be revising their essays for publication in Key Words.
The Raymond Williams Society 