The Raymond Williams Society postgraduate essay competition is named in honour of our late and much-missed colleague, Simon Dentith (1952-2014), former editor of Key Words and prize judge.
We’re delighted to announce that we have awarded two winners for 2025. First prize goes to Friederike Sachs for her essay ‘Against Popular Realism: Reading Glen James Brown’s Ironopolis (2018) with Raymond Williams.’ Friederike, who graduated with an MA in English Literatures from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2024, wins £250 and a year’s membership of the Society. The essay, which 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) – was praised for its painstaking reconstruction of Williams’ thinking and its critical readings of the fiction. 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). We are pleased to report that both authors are developing their essays for publication in Key Words. Congratulations Friederike and Alexander!
Previous winners
2024: Hannah Green (King College, London), ‘Mortgaged to the Grasping Soil: Land and Labour in the Poetry of R.S. Thomas’.
2020: Madoc Cairns (Oriel College, Oxford), ‘Art for Art’s sake? The “Craftsman Ideal”, Gender, Material Culture, and the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, 1880-1910’.
2019: Charlie Pullen (Queen Mary University of London), ‘”Childish Things”: Marion Richardson, Modernism, and the Teaching of Creativity’.
2018: Matti Ron (University of East Anglia), ‘An uneasy avant-garde: the politics of formal experimentation in 1930s working-class fiction’.
2017: Ryan David Furlong (University of Iowa), ‘”White Slaves” as “Black Slaves”: Re-evaluating the 19th c. Working-Class Autobiography within the (Con)texts of Transatlantic Abolitionism’.
2016: Laura McCormick Kilbride (University of Cambridge), ‘The New Catholic Left: Language, Liturgy and Literature in Slant Magazine, 1964-1970’
2015: Owen Holland (University of Cambridge), ‘From the Place Vendome to Trafalgar Square: Imperialism and Counter-Hegemony in the 1880s Romance Revival’
2013: Jennifer Morgan (University of Salford), ‘Uses of Shelley in Working-Class Culture’
2012: Chris Witter (Lancaster University) ‘Grace Paley and the Tenement Pastoral’
2010: Simon Machin (Roehampton University), ‘Why, comrade?: Raymond Williams, Orwell and Structure of Feeling in Boys’ Story Papers’
The Raymond Williams Society 