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. This year’s competition is open now.
The winner of the 2026 Simon Dentith Memorial Prize, the Society’s postgraduate essay competition, is Amy Todd (University of Manchester). Todd’s essay, ‘A Red Rag to a Bull: Red Rag magazine, Socialist Feminism, and the Communist Party of Great Britain,’ draws from her exciting PhD research on the British ‘magazine of liberation’ Red Rag (1972-1980). The essay beautifully reconstructs the sometimes strained relationships between the journal’s editorial collective, the British Communist Party and the wider trade union movement, as it looked for ways to criticise the labour movement while staying very much a part of it. Richly versed in the relevant archives, attentive to questions of form and institutional structure, the essay advances our understanding of this pivotal moment in the articulation of a Marxist feminism that empowers and unifies diverse and fragmentary experiences of oppression. We are thrilled that Amy has agreed to revise the article for publication in Key Words.
Previous winners
2026: Amy Todd (University of Manchester), ‘A Red Rag to a Bull: Red Rag magazine, Socialist Feminism, and the Communist Party of Great Britain’.
2025: Friederike Sachs (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) ‘Against Popular Realism: Reading Glen James Brown’s Ironopolis (2018) with Raymond Williams’ [1st place] and Alexander Curtis (University of Nottingham), ‘Periodizing the ’70s: Class Tensions in Britain at the Level of Literary Form’ [2nd place].
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’
