The Prize is an annual essay competition for postgraduates, established in 2017 by the Editors of English: The Journal of the English Association. The competition provides an ideal opportunity for students to enhance their CV through the publication of their work in an excellent high-profile journal that caters to a very wide range of genres, periods, and critical approaches. We are looking for essays that provide new perspectives on canonical and/or non-canonical Anglophone literatures, and therefore welcome submissions that focus on single authors/texts or a range, and which develop original arguments beyond simple close reading, while engaging with recent scholarship in relevant fields.
Competition details
The competition is open to any postgraduate student who is registered on a doctoral programme at any institution anywhere in the world. For more information, please visit the OUP English webpage.
2027 Postgraduate Essay Prize
The English Association is pleased to invite submissions to the English journal’s annual essay competition, which is exclusive to postgraduates. The competition provides an ideal opportunity for students to enhance their CV through the publication of their work in an excellent high-profile journal that caters to a very wide range of genres, periods, and critical approaches. We are looking for essays that provide new perspectives on canonical and/or non-canonical Anglophone literatures, and therefore welcome submissions that focus on single authors/texts or a range of connected texts, and which develop original arguments beyond simple close reading, while engaging with recent scholarship in relevant fields.
The 2027 competition will open in October 2026, with a deadline of January 31, 2027. Further details will appear on the English OUP website in due course, and in the journal itself. Any queries you might have about the competition in the interim can be sent to the journal editor via english.journaloftheea@gmail.com or w.rossiter@uea.ac.uk
All essays are subject to anonymous peer review by a panel of established experts in literary studies and all will be considered for publication in English. The award of £250 and publication in the journal will be made to the winner. There will also be a runner up prize of £100. Each will receive a year’s subscription to English.
Submissions
Submissions should be made through the journal’s submission portal: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/english
Please include EPEP in the submission title to indicate it is to be considered for the prize.
Submissions should meet the journal’s criteria for publication outlined on the journal webpages: https://academic.oup.com/english/pages/General_Instructions
2026 Essay Competition
The prizes were formally announced at the EA Conference on 13 June 2026.
The first prize went to Lizette Gerber, for her essay, ‘Theorizing Black Temporalities through Toni Morrison’s Novels’. This is a rich, nuanced reading of the diverse temporalities that traverse Morrison’s oeuvre, which presents a complex picture of an evolving representation of time as both narratological function and source of identity. It complicates previous studies that had tended to focus on individual works.
The runner-up prize went to Sosthenes Ekeh for his essay ‘Emerging at Intersections: Femininity, Agency, and Becoming in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood and Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter’. Sosthenes’ essay challenges the single-axis framing of the novels that deflects the focus of intersectionality, while tracing the slippages of such analysis, producing a new mode of reckoning with the lives of the characters. The female subject is here grasped as the locus of emergence and an intersection point of factors that shape their process of becoming.
The panel offers their sincere congratulations to Lizette and Sosthenes for their superlative, dynamic, and persuasive work.
We would like to give honourable mentions also to Maya Hollander for her essay ‘“I know the Word”: Creaturely Creation and Posthuman Exegesis in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017)’, and to Daria Feldman for ‘An Archive of Remains: Art, Trauma, and the Fragmentation of Self in Christine Lai’s Landscapes’. The work submitted for the competition operated at a consistently high level, which meant reaching the final decision was a very difficult process, and the panel was consistently impressed by the scholarly rigour and intellectual brilliance of the submissions. We thank everyone who took the time and care to submit their work.
Winner: Lizette Gerber, ‘Theorizing Black Temporalities through Toni Morrison’s Novels’
Lizette Gerber is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta on Treaty 6/Métis Nation Region 4 land. Her research primarily engages with speculative fiction through the theorizations of Black feminism, mad studies, queer studies, and their intersections.
Runner up: Sosthenes Ekeh, ‘Emerging at Intersections: Femininity, Agency, and Becoming in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood and Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter‘
Sosthenes Nnamdi Ekeh is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. He has taught English and Literary Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and the Use of English at Godfrey Okoye University, Enugu, Nigeria. His research centres, among others, on depression and suicidality in Africa, decoloniality, intersectionality, environmental humanities, and the intersection of Black psychology and critical suicidology in the articulation of postcolonial subjectivity. A writer and literary critic, his poems, short stories, and research papers have been published in both local and international journals.
2023 Essay Competition
This year we’re very pleased to introduce our winner and a runner-up. The prizes will be formally announced at the EA Conference on 14 June 2025.
Winner: Adam Maric-Cleaver, for his essay ‘‘Technology errs’: Brigid Brophy’s In Transit, Queer Stereo, and Failure’
Adam Maric-Cleaver is a PhD candidate at the University of East Anglia. He is writing a thesis on telecommunications and 1960s literary aesthetics, focusing on the work of Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, Anna Kavan, and Brigid Brophy. His interests include eco-theory, noise, and failure.
Runner-up: Francesca Ash, for her essay ‘Understanding the Old English Poetic Body: An Examination of Corporeal Compounds’
Francesca Ash recently completed her MPhil degree in Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic at Downing College, Cambridge. She is currently working towards her PhD in English and is a first year M4C doctoral training partner at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on non-binary presentations of gender in Old English literature.
2022 Essay Competition
This year we’re delighted to announce one overall winner and two runners-up. The prizes will be formally announced at the Awards Ceremony on 25 May 2023.
Winner: Georgie Walton, for her essay ‘Emerson and the Lyric Essay in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets’
Georgia Walton recently completed her PhD at the University of Leeds and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute. She researches American literature and culture from the nineteenth-century to the contemporary and her work has appeared in English Studies and the Irish Journal of American Studies. She is Associate Editor at parallax, a journal of critical and cultural theory.
Runner-up: Minh Vu, for their essay ‘Leftover Liquids and The Moisture of Mourning and Melancholia in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’
Minh Huynh Vu is a third-year doctoral student in the Combined Ph.D. Program in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, with a certificate in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. Their research examines everyday material cultures of decay and discard in the ongoing aftermaths of transpacific militarism and empire.
Runner-up: William Taylor, for his essay ‘‘A benevolent technology’: Desiring-production and the Petromodern Death Drive in J. G. Ballard’s Crash‘
William Taylor is a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow, exploring how contemporary bio- and eco-horror manifests conflicted attitudes – fear and desire – towards a nature that it presents as both alien and intractable. He uses this literature to advance new ideas in the areas of ecocriticism and infrastructure theory.
2021 Essay Competition
The prize was awarded to Aneesa Bodiat for her article ‘The Heroic Quest: Shadow-Journeys, Negative Journeys and the Peril of the Call Unanswered in the Writing of G. Willow Wilson’, at the Awards Ceremony on 25 May 2022.
2020 Essay Competition
It is with great pleasure that we announce the winners of the 2020 English Postgraduate Essay Prize. The first prize is awarded to Tara McEvoy, for ‘Sorry Not Sorry: (Non-)Apology, Satire, and The Vacuum Newspaper’. The runner-up prize goes to Jack Hart for ‘Wordsworth’s Self-Composure’.
Tara McEvoy recently completed a PhD in English Literature at Queen’s University Belfast, and currently works for Pushkin Press as a Press Officer. She co-founded and edits The Tangerine, a Belfast-based magazine of new writing. She has chapters forthcoming, later this year, in The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880-1950 (Edinburgh University Press), Irish Women Poets Rediscovered: Readings in Poetry from the18th-20th Century (Cork University Press), and A History of Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge University Press).
Jack is a tutor and doctoral researcher at Brasenose College, Oxford. His thesis examines how poems come about is intimately tangled up with what they’re about, as it focuses on how writers of the Romantic and Victorian periods revised their work. He also holds a degree in Classics from Durham University and a Master of Studies in English from the University of Oxford.
2019 Essay Competition
It is with great pleasure that we announce the winners of the 2019 English Postgraduate Essay Prize. The first prize is awarded to Amanda Davis, for ‘‘Ephemeral are gay gulps of laughter’: P. B. Shelley, Louis MacNeice, and the Ambivalence of Laughter’. The runner-up prize goes to Shiri Zuckerstaetter for ‘(English) dreams vs. (Hebrew) reality: Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as ‘Jewish American minor literature”‘.
Amanda Blake Davis is a PhD Candidate at the University of Sheffield researching androgyny in the poetry and prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her wider research interests include influence and imitation in Romantic poetry and prose, Plato and the Romantics, post-Romantic poets, and modern and contemporary Northern Irish poetry. She is a Postgraduate Representative for the British Association for Romantic Studies.
2018 Essay Competition
The English Association is delighted to announce the winners of the English Postgraduate Essay Prize:
Michael Allen’s ‘An Embarrassing Profession: Geoffrey Hill’s Auden’
Samantha Purvis’ ‘Happiness and Experimentalism: on H(A)PPY and The Lesser Bohemians’
This year, in break with tradition, the judges wished to acknowledge both winners equally by awarding two first-place prizes. Both winners will receive a year’s membership of the English Association with a subscription to English as well as an award of £250.
2017 Essay Competition
The winner of the 2017 competition was Doug Battersby’s ‘Contemporary Realism, Postmodernism, and Bodily Feeling: Ian McGuire’s The North Water‘. The piece is on the journal’s website and will appear in the Spring 2018 issue of English.
A runner-up prize was awarded to Evander Price, whose article ‘”From Dump to Glory”: Phantoms of the 1939 World’s Fair’ was highly praised by the judges.
