the age essay prize 2023

Dymocks to partner with the Age, Sydney Morning Herald, and Brisbane Times for essay prize

A new essay prize for young writers has been announced for Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria by the Brisbane Times , Sydney Morning Herald, and Age respectively, supported by Dymocks.

With separate competitions running in each of the three states, entries are now open for two age categories—writers aged 14 to 18 years, and those aged 19 to 24 years. Entrants are to write a persuasive nonfiction essay in response to one of several prompts, such as ‘What makes you optimistic about the future of Melbourne or Victoria?’ or for entrants in New South Wales, ‘What do you wish more people understood?’.

The Age described the competition as ‘an exciting chance for young writers to share their ideas with a vast audience’, with editor Patrick Elligett citing the need for young people to have a platform within public discourse. The hosting publications will publish the winning essays, as well as inviting winning writers to pitch up to four additional opinion pieces in the twelve months following.

Senior editors at the respective publications will form the judging committee for each competition, alongside guest judges Ellen van Neerven (Queensland), Tara June Winch (New South Wales), and Maxine Beneba Clarke (Victoria).

The first prize winner in each state will receive a cash prize of $1000, alongside a 12-month subscription to the hosting publication, as well as additional opportunities, such as a newsroom tour. Two runners up will also be awarded in each state, each receiving $500 and a 12-month subscription.

The shortlisted pieces will be announced in mid-November, with the winner announcements to follow at the end of the month.

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ANNOUNCING THE 2024 ESSAY PRIZE SHORTLIST

We are delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2024 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize, an annual competition for unpublished writers. Initially made possible by an Arts Council Grant in 2015, the prize awards £3,000 to the best proposal for a book-length essay (minimum 25,000 words) by a writer resident in the UK & Ireland who has yet to secure a publishing deal. In addition to the £3,000 prize the winner will have the opportunity to spend up to three months in residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, to work on their book. The book will then be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. The shortlist, chosen out of 151 entries, is as follows: 

Postcards by Sophie Brown, which begins as an essay about the work of American artist Susan Hiller – in particular her ongoing installation Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, a series of postcards which were first exhibited in 1976 in Brighton, Sophie Brown’s hometown – and fans out to consider a series of ‘unknown artists’ (those whose work was marginalized during their lifetimes, or which sits outside of the dominant canon) who are connected by works featuring the sea, including Pauline Boty and Kate Chopin. In a richly associative style, Postcards moves from what Hiller perceived to be a British fascination with rough seas to form a deft excavation of the collective unconscious, considering spectacle and voyeurism, early forms of ‘true crime’ in the UK, rumours of occult forces behind a chain of crimes in Lewes, automatic writing, cognitive dissonance and an abandoned film project by Derek Jarman. Sophie Brown is a writer and film programmer from Brighton. Her writing has appeared in Astra Magazine , Sight and Sound , The Quietus and Dazed & Confused , and she’s had essays commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Club des Femmes. Brown is a documentary programme advisor for the BFI London Film Festival and reviews documentary funding applications for the Sundance Institute. She has recently taught writing and research on visual culture at Parsons School of Design. Understanding Eleanor by Tomara Garrod, an essay about trans history, erasure and intimate connection across time. It uses varied, unorthodox literary modes and sources to build an intimate biography of Eleanor Rykener, a transfeminine sex worker living in fourteenth-century England. Writing with and against the erasure that Eleanor has faced – and that trans people continue to survive today – Tomara Garrod looks to connect with the everyday realities of Eleanor’s life as they lived it. Understanding Eleanor is an attempt to write trans history not simply as the history of a category, but as a call to transhistorical relation, bringing the contemporary writer/reader into intimate connection with the historical subject. Tomara Garrod is a writer, performer and facilitator from South London. They write experimental work for the page and stage, playing with form in search of new possibilities for storytelling and connection. A full portfolio of their work is available at www.tomaragarrod.com.

Fire is Not a Metaphor by Rio Matchett, which braids memoir, cultural history and lyric essay. Fire is Not a Metaphor documents the search for the root cause of clinical pyromania, defined by the DSM-V as the deliberate and purposeful setting of fires. More specifically, the essay is an investigation into the author’s own history: at the age of eighteen, Rio Matchett committed an act of arson, setting fire to a church, and was subsequently sectioned and later incarcerated. At once a cultural history of fire, a meditation on the relationship between mental illness and the British legal system and an unpicking of fire’s ubiquitous symbolic significance across art, literature and religion, Fire is Not a Metaphor is ultimately about the experience of being denied the relief of intelligibility. The essay enacts the process of accepting that denial, offering insight into clinical compulsion and asking universal questions about the dramaturgical urge to make sense of an often senseless world. Rio Matchett lives in West Yorkshire and works at Leeds Playhouse, where she leads on the development of new plays. She gained her PhD in literary modernism and queer theory from the University of Liverpool in 2022 and now leads the MA in Dramaturgy at Leeds Conservatoire. As an academic, she has published reviews for journals including The Poetry Review and James Joyce Quarterly, and has spoken about her research at institutions including the University of Oxford, the Università IULM Milan and the Sorbonne.

Afterlife by Lucy Mercer, which explores mortality, small- and large-scale collective making, the animate within the inanimate and the afterlives of materials through the mimetic medium of wax. Spilling across poetic thinking, candlemaking, the everyday, culture and ecology, and absorbing a wide range of references including Madame Tussauds, Europe’s biggest industrial candlemaking factory and the work of poets such as Louise Glück and Mary Ruefle, this lyric essay re-approaches this familiar but critically neglected biosynthetic material. Secreted and reconstituted from nonhuman bodies, in its flesh-like malleability wax also remains the closest reproductive medium we have of our bodies, blurring boundaries between life and death, the human and the non-human. Prioritising the materiality of wax and its environmental intersections as a focal point, while also considering wax as an amorphous, interstitial model for thought, Afterlife asks how we might conceptualise mortality as we become more collectively conscious of our environmental connectedness. Lucy Mercer is a writer based in London. Her first poetry collection, Emblem (Prototype, 2022), was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Her poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and her essays and reviews in Art Review , Bricks From The Kiln, Granta, INQUE, LA Review of Books, Poetry Review, Port Magazine and The White Review . She was awarded the inaugural White Review Poet’s Prize and is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. Since 2020 she has made candles with the artist Jamie Shovlin as an ongoing collaborative project, Croydon Candles.

Another Happy Day by Emilia Ong, which takes a frank and deeply personal look at the reasons for, and the consequences of, shoplifting. A mix of research, reportage and memoir, the essay finds its beginnings in a radical ‘self-audit’: it figures as Ong’s attempt to expose, such that she might interrogate and ultimately exhaust, her decade-long compulsion to shoplift. Drawing from the confessional writing of Annie Ernaux, Deborah Levy and Constance Debré, the essay charts the roiling feelings of guilt, revulsion, craving and crippling terror that accompany the thief – as well as the less respectable emotions of entitlement and exhilaration – while attempting to break through the taboo of talking about theft. At a time when national rates of shoplifting are soaring, Ong considers our cultural obsession with celebrity thieves, the extent to which theft can be framed as an anti-establishment act, and the financial necessity of shoplifting. In so doing, one thing becomes clear: theft – which could not exist without an all-pervasive ethos of ownership – can, beyond the violation of property laws, also appear in less tangible and more sinister forms. Emilia Ong is a writer and journalist based in Margate. Scholarship recipient at the Faber Academy, her work has been shortlisted for The Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism, longlisted for the Laura Kinsella Fellowship Early Career Award and shortlisted for the Morley Prize. She has been published in Ambit , 3:AM , HOAX and Channel Magazine , amongst others, and was awarded Arts Council England funding in 2023.

The Raman Effect by Abhinav Ullal. In the summer of 2023, Abhinav Ullal’s parents called him to say that they were selling their 95-year-old ancestral property – a bungalow built by Ullal’s grandparents in Malleswaram, one of Bangalore’s oldest suburbs. The buyer was an ambitious young builder with plans to use the land as a development site for soulless high-rise flats, thereby altering the area’s social fabric: making it more attractive to wealthy expats and migrants from other parts of the country. Initially indifferent towards the sale, in early 2024 Ullal decided to visit the house one last time; The Raman Effect follows the four weeks he spent in his family’s neighbourhood, telling the story of Malleswaram, both personal and collective. Part-family memoir, part-social history, the essay is a poignant record of a historic neighbourhood at a crucial turning point, and a moving meditation on loss, longing and belonging, fulfilment and community. Abhinav Ullal is a British-Indian writer and advertising creative director based in London.

The 2024 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize, an annual competition for unpublished writers, was open to submissions from 8 January until midnight on 17 March 2024. The judges will be looking for essays that explore and expand the possibilities of the essay form, with no restrictions on theme or subject matter. Initially made possible by an Arts Council Grant in 2015, the prize awards £3,000 to the best proposal for a book-length essay (minimum 25,000 words) by a writer resident in the UK & Ireland who has yet to secure a publishing deal. In addition to the £3,000 prize the winner will have the opportunity to spend up to two months in residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios  in Spoleto, Italy, to work on their book. The book will then be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

The prize aims to find the best emerging essay writers and to give them a chance to develop and showcase their talent. It also provides the winner with their first experience of publishing a book, from the planning, research and writing of it through to the editing, production and publicity stages. The prize is judged by Joanna Biggs, Brian Dillon, Joanna Kavenna, Max Porter and Jacques Testard. Full submission guidelines can be found below.

In 2023, Ghalya Saadawi was awarded the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize for her proposal Between October and November , an essay on time and loss under an extended, capitalist modernity, on what we keep and what is taken away. The essay has its beginnings in a letter to a friend, in which Saadawi explored political family histories, fashion and music’s retromania, postponement of writing, and the eruption of the past in the present. Written in fragments and digressions that thread cultural criticism, family memoir and life writing, the essay continues to think through the continued cultural obsession with the past and the future, foreclosed revolutionary legacies, the contradictions of destruction and tradition, mourning and the mediation of memory. The other shortlisted authors, chosen from 107 entries, were Luke Allan for There is another world, but it is this one , Toby Chai for  Embryos Denied Mitosis , Pete Kowalczyk with  Time is a Border , Matthew Porges for  The Balkan Bridge by Matthew Porges, and Asa Serezin with The Divorce Plot . The 2023 Essay Prize was judged by Joanna Biggs, Brian Dillon, Joanna Kavenna, Max Porter and Jacques Testard.

Marianne Brooker won the 2022 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize for her proposal I ntervals , an essay about choice, interdependence and end-of-life care, to be published in February 2024. Blending memoir, polemic and feminist philosophy in order to transform grief into a resource for politics, Intervals explores the space between proximity and complicity, charting the author’s care for her mother as she refused food and water at the end of her life, determined to end her suffering from Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis. The other shortlisted authors, chosen from 124 entries, were Chloe Evans for Elastic Bands , Holly Isard for Molecular Visions , Benoit Loîseau for Fast , Oliver Shamlou for Shabaneh and Radio Silence by Stephanie Y. Tam. The 2022 Essay Prize was judged by Joanna Biggs, Brian Dillon, Joanna Kavenna, Max Porter and Jacques Testard.

Heather McCalden was awarded the 2021 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize with The Observable Universe , a prismatic account of grief conveyed through images, anecdotes and Wikipedia-like entries, calibrated specifically for the Internet Age. Centred on the loss of her parents to AIDS in the early ’90s, The Observable Universe questions what it means to ‘go viral’ in an era of explosive biochemical and virtual contagion. It will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in March 2024. The other shortlisted entries were Q is for Garden by Jenny Chamarette, The Report by Joshua Craze, Terra Nullius by Joanna Pidcock, The Raven’s Nest by Sarah Thomas, and Broken Rice by April Yee. The 2021 Essay Prize was judged by Joanna Biggs, Brian Dillon, Joanna Kavenna, Max Porter and Jacques Testard.

Thea Lenarduzzi was awarded the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize with her proposal for Dandelions , a family memoir and social history about two women piecing together themselves and each other from the fragments of four generations’ worth of migration between Italy and England, and the stories scattered along the way. Dandelions was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in September 2022. The other shortlisted entries were Not Revolving by Rashed Aqrabawi, Black Space in the Basement by Elliot C. Mason, Which As You Know Means Violence by Philippa Snow, We Blew Them Into Shards of Dust by Sean Stoker and Mrs Gargantua: Cuba, the United States and the New Man by JS Tennant. The 2020 Essay Prize was judged by Joanna Biggs, Brian Dillon, Joanna Kavenna, Paul Keegan and Jacques Testard. 

In 2019, Polly Barton was awarded the fourth iteration of the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize for Fifty Sounds , an attempt to exhaust her obsession with the country she moved to at the age of 21, before eventually becoming a literary translator. From min-min, the sound of air screaming, to jin-jin, the sound of being touched for the very first time, from hi’sori, the sound of harbouring masochist tendencies, to mote-mote, the sound of becoming a small-town movie star, Fifty Sounds is a personal dictionary of the Japanese language, recounting her life as an outsider in Japan. Fifty Sounds was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in April 2021. The other four shortlisted entries were On Lunar Thinking  by Amy Budd,  There is California Champagne: Dignity and Work at the End of the World  by Michael Docherty,  Tender as Memory  by Maria Howard, and  Common Periwinkle  by Bryony White. The 2019 Essay Prize was judged by Joanna Biggs, Brian Dillon, Joanna Kavenna, Paul Keegan and Jacques Testard. 

In 2018, Joanna Pocock won the prize for Surrender , a narrative non-fiction work on the changing landscape of the West and the scavenger, rewilder and Ecosexual communities, inspired by a two-year stay in Montana.  Surrender  was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in May 2019 . The other five shortlisted entries were  A Woman’s Place  by Rachel Andrews, Oliver Basciano’s  Tichileşti , Felix Bazalgette’s  Natural Magic ,  Gay Bar  by Jeremy Atherton Lin, and Rebecca Perry’s  Four Invocations . The 2018 Essay Prize was judged by Joanna Biggs, Brian Dillon, Joanna Kavenna, Paul Keegan and Jacques Testard. 

In 2017, Katy Whitehead was awarded the prize for  Adventures in Synthetic Fun , an essay exploring the concept of ‘synthetic fun’ coined in the 1960s by Jeremy Sandford, and the changing nature of fun in an era of increasing automation, disputed oppression, widespread affective labour, illusory meritocracy, costly social mobility, divisive politics, and a degraded imagination. The other four shortlisted entries were  Wolf: An Anatomy of an Illness  by Elinor Cleghorn;  English as a Foreign Language  by Evan Harris;  Other, Mixed  by Will Harris; and  Possession by Rebecca Ley. The 2017 Essay Prize was judged by Joanna Biggs, Brian Dillon, Joanna Kavenna, Paul Keegan and Jacques Testard. 

In 2016, Matthew McNaught was awarded the inaugural Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize for  Immanuel , an essay about faith, doubt and radical religion, inspired in part by his experiences growing up in an evangelical Christian community in the south of England. Immanuel was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in June 2022. The other four shortlisted entries were Corona  by Felix Bazalgette;  Bad For You  by Alice Hattrick;  Growing up Modern  by Jennifer Kabat; and  Double-Tracking by Rosanna Mclaughlin. The 2016 Essay Prize was judged by Joanna Biggs, Brian Dillon, Paul Keegan, Ali Smith and Jacques Testard. 

THE MAHLER & LEWITT STUDIOS

The Mahler & LeWitt Studios are established around the former studios of Anna Mahler and Sol LeWitt in Spoleto, Italy. The residency programme provides a focused and stimulating environment for artists, curators and writers to develop new ways of working in dialogue with peers and the unique cultural heritage of the region. For more information please visit  mahler-lewitt.org . 

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

Joanna Biggs is a writer and editor at Harper’s  and co-founder of Silver Press. Her book about the way we work,  All Day Long , was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2015. Her second book, A Life of One’s Own , was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in May 2023. 

Brian Dillon is a writer and critic. His books include  Suppose a Sentence (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020),  Essayism (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017),  The Great Explosion  (Penguin, 2015),  Objects in This Mirror: Essays  (Sternberg Press, 2014), Sanctuary  (Sternberg Press, 2011),  Tormented Hope  (Penguin, 2009) and  In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005; Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018). He teaches creative writing at the Queen Mary. Affinities , a book about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in February 2023. 

Joanna Kavenna is the author of  The Ice Museum (Viking, 2006),  Inglorious  (Faber & Faber, 2007),  The Birth of Love  (Faber & Faber, 2011),  Come to the Edge  (riverrun, 2012),  A Field Guide to Reality  (riverrun, 2017) and  Zed  (Faber & Faber, 2019). Her writing has appeared in the  New Yorker ,  Guardian, Observer ,  Telegraph ,  Spectator ,  London Review of Books  and  New York Times  and she has held writing fellowships at St Antony's College Oxford and St John's College Cambridge. In 2011 she was named as one of the  Telegraph ’s 20 Writers Under 40 and in 2013 was listed as one of  Granta ’s Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in Oxfordshire.

Max Porter is the author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (Faber & Faber, 2016), winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize; Lanny (Faber & Faber, 2019), longlisted for the Booker Prize; and an essay, The Death of Francis Bacon (Faber & Faber, 2021). His latest novel, Shy , was published in April 2023 by Faber & Faber. 

Jacques Testard is the publisher of Fitzcarraldo Editions and a founding editor of The White Review .  

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Please read these eligibility and entry rules carefully before submitting. Submission of an entry is taken as acceptance of the entry rules. For any queries not covered below, please email [email protected]. 

1) The competition is open to unpublished writers residing in Great Britain and Ireland only.

2) Entrants should submit a proposal for a book-length essay (over 25,000 words) to [email protected]. The proposal itself should be no longer than 5,000 words. Entrants may also submit a separate writing sample of up to 5,000 words. Proposals and samples should be double-spaced, 12pt. 

3) Each proposal should outline the subject matter, scope, style and structure of the proposed essay, and include a word count, delivery date and biographical note.  

4) The proposals must be original, not previously submitted to a publisher. The writing sample may be previously published work. 

5) Entries can also be sent by post to Fitzcarraldo Editions, A103, 8-12 Creekside, London SE8 3DX. 

6) Only submissions received by email or by post by midnight on 17 March 2024 (GMT) will be considered.

7) Entries that are incomplete, are corrupted or submitted after the deadline will not be considered.

8) The entry must be the entrant’s own original creation and must not infringe upon the right or copyright of any person or entity.

9) Co-authored entries will not be accepted. 

10) Writers who have existing contracts, or who have previously held contracts, with publishers for books of fiction or non-fiction are not eligible to enter.

11) Writers who have published writing (fiction or non-fiction) in magazines and journals are eligible to enter.

12) Writers who have published books of poetry are eligible to enter.

13) Writers may submit only one proposal per iteration of the prize. 

14) The proposed essay must be written in English (no translations).

15) Submissions must be made by the author of the proposal.

16) There are no age restrictions.

17) When submitting, please include a short covering letter including your contact details, your name and the title of your proposed essay. The covering letter should be in the same document as your submission. Entrants should also submit a separate one-page cover letter on how they propose to use the residency at the Mahler-LeWitt Studios. 

18) Submissions from writers residing outside of Great Britain and Ireland will not be considered.

19) All submissions should include page numbers.

20) The essay must be original and should not have been previously published anywhere in full or in part. Published work is taken to mean published in any printed, publicly accessible form, e.g. anthology, magazine, newspaper. It is also taken to mean published online, with the exception of personal blogs and personal websites.

21) A meeting will be organised with all shortlisted writers to discuss their book proposal before the award of the prize. 

22) Unsuccessful entrants will not be contacted.

23) No editorial feedback will be provided to unsuccessful entrants.

24) The decision of the judges is final and no correspondence will be entered into regarding the judging process.

25) Fitzcarraldo Editions will have the exclusive right to publish the winning essay once it has been written, but reserves the right not to publish. 

26) Only submissions which meet all Terms and Conditions will be considered.

27) By entering this competition, each entrant agrees to be bound by these Terms and Conditions.

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 Competition Results

Announcing the 2023 essay prize winners special congratulations to those who achieved a distinction or high distinction in this year's competition. those who did so but did not attend the prize-giving ceremony will be contacted by email, providing access to their ecertificates by the end of the month . p hotographs from our prize-winning ceremony and related events in oxfo rd will be emailed to those who attended.  , grand prize, hosei kishida, shanghai american school, china.

Junior Prize

Winner:    Xibei Kuang, Pinehurst school, New Zealand

Second Prize:  Alissa Song, Kambala, Australia

Third Prize:   Iris Zhu, Bement School, USA

ECONOMICS Prize

Winner:  Kit Young Tham , Hwa Chong Institution, Singapore

Second Prize:  Kevin Hao, Knox Grammar School, Australia

Third Prize:   Zhong Yang M. Yeh, Shanghai High School International Division, China

PHILOSOPHY Prize

Winner:    Hosei Kishida, Shanghai American School, China

Second Prize:  Amanda Sun, Princeton High School, USA

Third Prize:   Qianyu Lin , Raffles Institution, Singapore

POLITICS Prize

Winner:  William Zhou, Hunter College High School, USA

Second Prize:  Ziyi Wei, Westridge School for Girls, USA

Third Prize:   Xiaoya Du , The High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China, China

HISTORY Prize

Winner:    Yoo Jin Cho, Presbyterian Ladies' College, Australia

Second Prize:  Hannah Fareed, Karachi Grammar School, Pakistan

Third Prize:   Quynh Anh La Le, Saigon South International School, Vietnam

Winner:  Youran Wu, Nanjing Foreign Language School British Columbia Academy, China

Second Prize:  Kayson Hu, Reddam House Sydney, Australia 

Equal Third Prize:  L ucienne Keyoung, Manhasset High School, USA

Equal Third Prize:  Esme Vallois-Davies, Colchester Royal Grammar School, UK

THEOLOGY Prize

Winner:    Hanyu Li, High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China, China

Second Prize:  Shivraj Sharma, Neerja Modi School, India

Third Prize:   Scarlet Strogov, South Orange Middle School, USA

PSYCHOLOGY Prize

Winner:    Claire Yura Kim, Berkshire School, USA

Second Prize:  Arnav Pandey, The International School Bangalore, India 

Third Prize:   Hannah Kim, La Canada High School, USA

RECENT Essay Prize Winners

Grand Prize

Benjamin Who, The Hotchkiss School, USA

Winner: Selena Teng, Millburn High School, USA

Second Prize: Jinchuan Li, The Experimental High School attached   to Beijing Normal University, China

Third Prize: Vivian Li, Magdalen College School, UK

Winner: Pengzhe Lin, Cranbrook Schools, USA

Second Prize: Brandon Ma, Living Word Shanghai Bilingual School, China

Third Prize: Fengshuo Wang, Allendale Columbia School, USA

Winner:  Benjamin Who, The Hotchkiss School, USA

Second Prize: Ke Ren, Ulink Beijing, China

Third Prize: Yixi Zhang, Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University, China

Winner: Yifan Liu, Independent Schools Foundation, Hong Kong

Second Prize: Xiaoyi Shi, Shanghai Foreign Language School Affiliated to SISU, China

Third Prize: Chenrui Dai, Ruian High School International Department, China

Winner: Shahmeer Bukhari, Karachi Grammar School, Pakistan

Second Prize : Sujeong Park, North London Collegiate School Jeju, Republic of South Korea

Third Prize: Samantha Shim, Phillips Academy, USA

Winner: Jonathan Pan, The King's School, Australia

Second Prize: Xinyue Zhu, Bard College at Simon's Rock, USA

Third Prize: Chloe Huang, Westminster School, UK

​Winner: Gabriel Stoney, Rugby School, UK

Second Prize: Yifei Chen, Wuxi Big Bridge Academy, China

Third Prize: Donghong Wei- Shenzhen College of International Education, China ​

Winner:   Cheuk Hei Chung, Chinese International School, Hong Kong

Second Prize: Teresa Yan, PS/MS 219 Paul Klapper, USA

Third Prize: Jia ning Zhang, Veritas Christian Academy, USA

Huaming Li, Xi’an Gaoxin No.1 High School, China

Winner: Austin Swaffer, Knox Grammar School, Australia

Second Prize: Chongwen Gu, YK Pao School, China​

Third Prize: Dana Song, Horace Mann, USA

Winner: Andre Pancholi, Latymer Upper School, UK

Second Prize: Yuhan Wang, Dunman High School, Singapore

Third Prize: Justin Chan, Harrow School, UK

Winner:  Marc Kadir, The Manchester Grammar School, UK

Second Prize: Arshiya Jain, Modern School Vasant Vihar, India

Third Prize: Alexander Chen, Archmere Academy, USA

Winner: Major Shokar, Aylesbury Grammar School, UK

Second Prize: Zoya Fasihuddin, Karachi Grammar School, Pakistan

Third Prize: Stella Zhu, Northfield Mount Hermon, USA​

Winner: Eugene Choi, International School Manila, Philippines

Second Prize: InChan Yang, Winchester College, UK

Third Prize: Sarah Carr, Sidcot School, UK

Winner: Aiden Whitham, St. Paul's School, UK

Second Prize: Laura Koscielska, The Purcell School For Young Musicians, UK

Third Prize: Naciima Mohamed, Columbia Heights High School, USA

​Winner: Hao Tian, Beijing New Talent Academy, China

Second Prize: Huaming Li, Xi’an Gaoxin No.1 High School, China

Third Prize: Corey Koh, Raffles Institution, Singapore ​

Winner:  Joonyoung Heo, Pacific Cascade Middle School, USA

Second Prize: Stephanie Mo, Indian Mountain School, USA

Third Prize: Rena Kim, Menlo School, USA​​​

Ethan Christian Tan, Anglo-Chinese School, Singapore

Winner: Ethan Christian Tan, ACS (Independent), Singapore

Second Prize: Min-Jun Kang, Korea International School, Korea

Third Prize: Ali Haider, Wallington County Grammar School, UK

Winner: Helny Hobbs, Newstead Wood School, UK

Second Prize: Elizabeth Zhu, University of Toronto School, Canada

Third Prize: Calvin Xu, Appleby College, Canada

Winner:  Raphael Conte, Sir William Borlase's Grammar School, UK

Second Prize: Saskia Poulter, The Tiffin Girls' School, UK

Third Prize: Jaimin Shah, King Edward VI Grammar School, UK

Winner: Runan Lin, Georgetown Preparatory School, USA

Second Prize: Christopher Conway, King's College School, UK

Equal Third Prize: Sungjin Park, Wellington College, UK and

                                  Megan Cui, Phillips Andover Academy, USA

Winner: Tianyi Jia, Princeton High School, USA

Second Prize: Henry Barker, Felsted School, UK

Third Prize: Jessica Na, Interlake High School, USA

Winner: Noah Buckle, Watford Grammar School for Boys, UK

Second Prize: Zheng Wei Lim, Raffles Institution, Singapore

Third Prize: Varun Venkatesh, Tanglin Trust School, Singapore

​Winner: Sirui Cai, Raffles Institution, Singapore

Second Prize: Junfang Zhang, Hwa Chong Institution, Singapore

Third Prize: Christopher Bong, ARCH Education, Hong Kong ​

Winner:  Jason Hausenloy, UWCSEA East Campus, Singapore

Second Prize: Anna Rantakari, Wellington College, UK

Third Prize: Alexander Fletcher, St Paul's School, UK

Luke Duthie, Germantown Academy, Pennsylvania, US

Winner: Younghoon Seo, Chadwick International School, South Korea

Second Prize: Jiajun Chung, Anglo-Chinese Junior College, Singapore

Third Prize: Maximilian Fawcett, St Paul's School, UK

Winner: Nayah Victoria Thu, Oslo International School, Norway

Second Prize: Daniel Craig-McFeely, St Paul's School, UK

Third Prize: Haritha Kumar, Cupertino High School, US

Winner:  Luke Duthie, Germantown Academy, US

Second Prize: Janusha Uthayakumar, Woodford County High School for Girls, UK

Third Prize: Harry Toube, City of London School, UK

Winner: Rosie Ashmore, Hagley Roman Catholic High School, UK

Second Prize: Mihira Philip, Sutton Grammar School, UK

Equal Third Prize: George Chadney, The Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, UK

                                  Clemmie Read, St Paul's Girls' School, UK

Winner: Zikai Zhou, Xiaoshi High School, China

Second Prize: Claire Yoonsuh Kim, Chadwick International School, South Korea

Third Prize: Sophie Kelly, Millfield School, UK

Winner: Elijah Lee, Anglo-Chinese School (Independent), Singapore

Second Prize: Cindy Xin, Albany High School, US

Third Prize: Andrzej Karpiński, II High School In Poznan, Poland

​Winner: Judy Hyojoo Rhee, University Hill Secondary School, Canada

Second Prize: Jonathan Lee, Abingdon School, UK

Third Prize: Alexander Archer, Eton College, UK ​

Equal First Prize: Ethan Zhu, The King's School, Australia

                                Indigo Lee-Wilson, Ascham School, Australia

Third Prize: Jason Hausenloy, UWC South East Asia East Campus, Singapore​​​

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The Orwell Youth Prize 2024

What does home mean to you? A physical space? A person? A memory? A town? A country? Our planet? A dream? At a time when our idea of home seems under pressure, from the cost-of-living crisis and the housing crisis, to the plight of refugees and the climate crisis, we want you to write about what home means to you. The Orwell Youth Prize is far more than just a Prize. Every young writer who enters by our feedback deadline of 8th April 2024 [updated deadline!] is offered personalised feedback from our volunteer readers. We also have resources and inspiration to help you on every step of your writing journey. This year, we are opening the Prize to all secondary school students, including Year 7s. The Prize is open to anyone in years 7-13 who is at school or college in the United Kingdom.

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The Radcliffe Line

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THE QUEEN'S COMMONWEALTH ESSAY COMPETITION

Since 1883, we have delivered The Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition, the world's oldest international schools' writing competition. Today, we work to expand its reach, providing life-changing opportunities for young people around the world.

The Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition 2024 is now closed for entries

Find out more about this year’s theme

'Our Common Wealth'.

140 years of The Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition

The Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition (QCEC) is the world’s oldest international writing competition for schools and has been proudly delivered by the Royal Commonwealth Society since 1883. 

ABOUT THE COMPETITION 

An opportunity for young Commonwealth citizens to share their thoughts, ideas and experiences on key global issues and have their hard work and achievement celebrated internationally.

Frequently Asked Questions for the Competition. Before contacting us please read these.

MEET THE WINNERS 

In 2023 we were delighted to receive a record-breaking 34,924 entries, with winners from India and Malaysia. Read their winning pieces as well as those from previous years.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Terms and Conditions for entrants to The Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition. Please ensure you have thoroughly read them before submitting your entry.

Final Summer I 2024 Application Deadline is June 2, 2024.  

Click here to apply.

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The Ultimate Guide to the John Locke Essay Competition

Humanities and social sciences students often lack the opportunities to compete at the global level and demonstrate their expertise. Competitions like ISEF, Science Talent Search, and MIT Think are generally reserved for students in fields like biology, physics, and chemistry.

At Lumiere, many of our talented non-STEM students, who have a flair for writing are looking for ways to flex their skills. In this piece, we’ll go over one such competition - the John Locke Essay Competition. If you’re interested in learning more about how we guide students to win essay contests like this, check out our main page .

What is the John Locke Essay Competition?

The essay competition is one of the various programs conducted by the John Locke Institute (JLI) every year apart from their summer and gap year courses. To understand the philosophy behind this competition, it’ll help if we take a quick detour to know more about the institute that conducts it.

Founded in 2011, JLI is an educational organization that runs summer and gap year courses in the humanities and social sciences for high school students. These courses are primarily taught by academics from Oxford and Princeton along with some other universities. The organization was founded by Martin Cox. Our Lumiere founder, Stephen, has met Martin and had a very positive experience. Martin clearly cares about academic rigor.

The institute's core belief is that the ability to evaluate the merit of information and develop articulate sound judgments is more important than merely consuming information. The essay competition is an extension of the institute - pushing students to reason through complex questions in seven subject areas namely Philosophy, Politics, Economics, History, Psychology, Theology, and Law​.

The organization also seems to have a strong record of admissions of alumni to the top colleges in the US and UK. For instance, between 2011 and 2022, over half of John Locke alumni have gone on to one of eight colleges: Chicago, Columbia, Georgetown, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale.

How prestigious is the John Locke Contest?

The John Locke Contest is a rigorous and selective writing competition in the social sciences and humanities. While it is not as selective as the Concord Review and has a much broader range of students who can receive prizes, it is still considered a highly competitive program.

Winning a John Locke essay contest will have clear benefits for you in your application process to universities and would reflect well on your application. On the other hand, a shortlist or a commendation might not have a huge impact given that it is awarded to many students (more on this later).

What is the eligibility for the contest?

Students, of any country, who are 18 years old or younger before the date of submission can submit. They also have a junior category for students who are fourteen years old, or younger, on the date of the submission deadline.

Who SHOULD consider this competition?

We recommend this competition for students who are interested in social sciences and humanities, in particular philosophy, politics, and economics. It is also a good fit for students who enjoy writing, want to dive deep into critical reasoning, and have some flair in their writing approach (more on that below).

While STEM students can of course compete, they will have to approach the topics through a social science lens. For example, in 2021, one of the prompts in the division of philosophy was, ‘Are there subjects about which we should not even ask questions?’ Here, students of biology can comfortably write about topics revolving around cloning, gene alteration, etc, however, they will have to make sure that they are able to ground this in the theoretical background of scientific ethics and ethical philosophy in general.

Additional logistics

Each essay should address only one of the questions in your chosen subject category, and must not exceed 2000 words (not counting diagrams, tables of data, footnotes, bibliography, or authorship declaration).

If you are using an in-text-based referencing format, such as APA, your in-text citations are included in the word limit.

You can submit as many essays as you want in any and all categories. (We recommend aiming for only one given how time-consuming it can be to come up with a single good-quality submission)

Important dates

Prompts for the 2023 competition will be released in January 2023. Your submission will be due around 6 months later in June. Shortlisted candidates will be notified in mid-July which will be followed by the final award ceremony in September.

How much does it cost to take part?

What do you win?

A scholarship that will offset the cost of attending a course at the JLI. The amount will vary between $2000 and $10,000 based on whether you are a grand prize winner (best essay across all categories) or a subject category winner. (JLI programs are steeply-priced and even getting a prize in your category would not cover the entire cost of your program. While the website does not mention the cost of the upcoming summer program, a different website mentions it to be 3,000 GBP or 3600 USD)

If you were shortlisted, most probably, you will also receive a commendation certificate and an invitation to attend an academic ceremony at Oxford. However, even here, you will have to foot the bill for attending the conference, which can be a significant one if you are an international student.

How do you submit your entry?

You submit your entry through the website portal that will show up once the prompts for the next competition are up in January! You have to submit your essay in pdf format where the title of the pdf attachment should read SURNAME, First Name, Category, and Question Number (e.g. POPHAM, Alexander, Psychology, Q2).

What are the essay prompts like?

We have three insights here.

Firstly, true to the spirit of the enlightenment thinker it is named after, most of the prompts have a philosophical bent and cover ethical, social, and political themes. In line with JLI’s general philosophy, they force you to think hard and deeply about the topics they cover. Consider a few examples to understand this better:

“Are you more moral than most people you know? How do you know? Should you strive to be more moral? Why or why not?” - Philosophy, 2021

“What are the most important economic effects - good and bad - of forced redistribution? How should this inform government policy?” - Economics, 2020

“Why did the Jesus of Nazareth reserve his strongest condemnation for the self-righteous?” - Theology, 2021

“Should we judge those from the past by the standards of today? How will historians in the future judge us?” - History, 2021

Secondly, at Lumiere, our analysis is that most of these prompts are ‘deceptively rigorous’ because the complexity of the topic reveals itself gradually. The topics do not give you a lot to work with and it is only when you delve deeper into one that you realize the extent to which you need to research/read more. In some of the topics, you are compelled to define the limits of the prompt yourself and in turn, the scope of your essay. This can be a challenging exercise. Allow me to illustrate this with an example of the 2019 philosophy prompt.

“Aristotelian virtue ethics achieved something of a resurgence in the twentieth century. Was this progress or retrogression?”

Here you are supposed to develop your own method for determining what exactly constitutes progress in ethical thought. This in turn involves familiarizing yourself with existing benchmarks of measurement and developing your own method if required. This is a significant intellectual exercise.

Finally, a lot of the topics are on issues of contemporary relevance and especially on issues that are contentious . For instance, in 2019, one of the prompts for economics was about the benefits and costs of immigration whereas the 2020 essay prompt for theology was about whether Islam is a religion of peace . As we explain later, your ‘opinion’ here can be as ‘outrageous’ as you want it to be as long as you are able to back it up with reasonable arguments. Remember, the JLI website clearly declares itself to be, ‘ not a safe space, but a courteous one ’.

How competitive is the JLI Essay Competition?

In 2021, the competition received 4000 entries from 101 countries. Given that there is only one prize winner from each category, this makes this a very competitive opportunity. However, because categories have a different number of applicants, some categories are more competitive than others. One strategy to win could be to focus on fields with fewer submissions like Theology.

There are also a relatively significant number of students who receive commendations called “high commendation.” In the psychology field, for example, about 80 students received a commendation in 2022. At the same time, keep in mind that the number of students shortlisted and invited to Oxford for an academic conference is fairly high and varies by subject. For instance, Theology had around 50 people shortlisted in 2021 whereas Economics had 238 . We, at Lumiere, estimate that approximately 10% of entries of each category make it to the shortlisting stage.

How will your essay be judged?

The essays will be judged on your understanding of the discipline, quality of argumentation and evidence, and writing style. Let’s look at excerpts from various winning essays to see what this looks like in practice.

Level of knowledge and understanding of the relevant material: Differentiating your essay from casual musing requires you to demonstrate knowledge of your discipline. One way to do that is by establishing familiarity with relevant literature and integrating it well into their essay. The winning essay of the 2020 Psychology Prize is a good example of how to do this: “People not only interpret facts in a self-serving way when it comes to their health and well-being; research also demonstrates that we engage in motivated reasoning if the facts challenge our personal beliefs, and essentially, our moral valuation and present understanding of the world. For example, Ditto and Liu showed a link between people’s assessment of facts and their moral convictions” By talking about motivated reasoning in the broader literature, the author can show they are well-versed in the important developments in the field.

Competent use of evidence: In your essay, there are different ways to use evidence effectively. One such way involves backing your argument with results from previous studies . The 2020 Third Place essay in economics shows us what this looks like in practice: “Moreover, this can even be extended to PTSD, where an investigation carried out by Italian doctor G. P. Fichera, led to the conclusion that 13% of the sampling units were likely to have this condition. Initiating economic analysis here, this illustrates that the cost of embarking on this unlawful activity, given the monumental repercussions if caught, is not equal to the costs to society...” The study by G.P. Fichera is used to strengthen the author’s claim on the social costs of crime and give it more weight.

Structure, writing style, and persuasive force: A good argument that is persuasive rarely involves merely backing your claim with good evidence and reasoning. Delivering it in an impactful way is also very important. Let’s see how the winner of the 2020 Law Prize does this: “Slavery still exists, but now it applies to women and its name in prostitution”, wrote Victor Hugo in Les Misérables. Hugo’s portrayal of Fantine under the archetype of a fallen woman forced into prostitution by the most unfortunate of circumstances cannot be more jarringly different from the empowerment-seeking sex workers seen today, highlighting the wide-ranging nuances associated with commercial sex and its implications on the women in the trade. Yet, would Hugo have supported a law prohibiting the selling of sex for the protection of Fantine’s rights?” The use of Victor Hugo in the first line of the essay gives it a literary flair and enhances the impact of the delivery of the argument. Similarly, the rhetorical question, in the end, adds to the literary dimension of the argument. Weaving literary and argumentative skills in a single essay is commendable and something that the institute also recognizes.

Quality of argumentation: Finally, the quality of your argument depends on capturing the various elements mentioned above seamlessly . The third place in theology (2020) does this elegantly while describing bin-Laden’s faulty and selective use of religious verses to commit violence: “He engages in the decontextualization and truncation of Qur'anic verses to manipulate and convince, which dissociates the fatwas from bonafide Islam. For example, in his 1996 fatwa, he quotes the Sword verse but deliberately omits the aforementioned half of the Ayat that calls for mercy. bin-Laden’s intention is not interpretive veracity, but the indoctrination of his followers.” The author’s claim is that bin-Laden lacks religious integrity and thus should not be taken seriously, especially given the content of his messages. To strengthen his argument, he uses actual incidents to dissect this display of faulty reasoning.

These excerpts are great examples of the kind of work you should keep in mind when writing your own draft.

6 Winning Tips from Lumiere

Focus on your essay structure and flow: If logic and argumentation are your guns in this competition, a smooth flow is your bullet. What does a smooth flow mean? It means that the reader should be able to follow your chain of reasoning with ease. This is especially true for essays that explore abstract themes. Let’s see this in detail with the example of a winning philosophy essay. “However, if society were the moral standard, an individual is subjected to circumstantial moral luck concerning whether the rules of the society are good or evil (e.g., 2019 Geneva vs. 1939 Munich). On the other hand, contracts cannot be the standard because people are ignorant of their being under a moral contractual obligation, when, unlike law, it is impossible to be under a contract without being aware. Thus, given the shortcomings of other alternatives, human virtue is the ideal moral norm.” To establish human virtue as the ideal norm, the author points out limitations in society and contracts, leaving out human virtue as the ideal one. Even if you are not familiar with philosophy, you might still be able to follow the reasoning here. This is a great example of the kind of clarity and logical coherence that you should strive for.

Ground your arguments in a solid theoretical framework : Your essay requires you to have well-developed arguments. However, these arguments need to be grounded in academic theory to give them substance and differentiate them from casual opinions. Let me illustrate this with an example of the essay that won second place in the politics category in 2020. “Normatively, the moral authority of governments can be justified on a purely associative basis: citizens have an inherent obligation to obey the state they were born into. As Dworkin argued, “Political association, like family or friendship and other forms of association more local and intimate, is itself pregnant of obligation” (Dworkin). Similar to a family unit where children owe duties to their parents by virtue of being born into that family regardless of their consent, citizens acquire obligations to obey political authority by virtue of being born into a state.” Here, the author is trying to make a point about the nature of political obligation. However, the core of his argument is not the strength of his own reasoning, but the ability to back his reasoning with prior literature. By quoting Dworkin, he includes important scholars of western political thought to give more weight to his arguments. It also displays thorough research on the part of the author to acquire the necessary intellectual tools to write this paper.

The methodology is more important than the conclusion: The 2020 history winners came to opposite conclusions in their essays on whether a strong state hampers or encourages economic growth. While one of them argued that political strength hinders growth when compared to laissez-faire, the other argues that the state is a prerequisite for economic growth . This reflects JLI’s commitment to your reasoning and substantiation instead of the ultimate opinion. The lesson: Don’t be afraid to be bold! Just make sure you are able to back it up.

Establish your framework well: A paragraph (or two) that is able to succinctly describe your methodology, core arguments, and the reasoning behind them displays academic sophistication. A case in point is the introduction of 2019’s Philosophy winner: “To answer the question, we need to construct a method that measures progress in philosophy. I seek to achieve this by asserting that, in philosophy, a certain degree of falsification is achievable. Utilizing philosophical inquiry and thought experiments, we can rationally assess the logical validity of theories and assign “true” and “false” status to philosophical thoughts. With this in mind, I propose to employ the fourth process of the Popperian model of progress…Utilizing these two conditions, I contend that Aristotelian virtue ethics was progress from Kantian ethics and utilitarianism.” Having a framework like this early on gives you a blueprint for what is in the essay and makes it easier for the reader to follow the reasoning. It also helps you as a writer since distilling down your core argument into a paragraph ensures that the first principles of your essay are well established.

Read essays of previous winners: Do this and you will start seeing some patterns in the winning essays. In economics, this might be the ability to present a multidimensional argument and substantiating it with data-backed research. In theology, this might be your critical analysis of religious texts .

Find a mentor: Philosophical logic and argumentation are rarely taught at the high school level. Guidance from an external mentor can fill this academic void by pointing out logical inconsistencies in your arguments and giving critical feedback on your essay. Another important benefit of having a mentor is that it will help you in understanding the heavy literature that is often a key part of the writing/research process in this competition. As we have already seen above, having a strong theoretical framework is crucial in this competition. A mentor can make this process smoother.

Lumiere Research Scholar Program

If you’re looking for a mentor to do an essay contest like John Locke or want to build your own independent research paper, then consider applying to the Lumiere Research Scholar Program . Last year over 2100 students applied for about 500 spots in the program. You can find the application form here.

You can see our admission results here for our students.

Manas is a publication strategy associate at Lumiere Education. He studied public policy and interactive media at NYU and has experience in education consulting.

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Think Essay Prize

Submissions have now closed for the 2024 Think Essay Prize.

The Royal Institute of Philosophy is pleased to announce the inaugural essay competition for Think .

Think is our journal designed to be a fully accessible but challenging journal and the successful submission will be published alongside articles from leading philosophers from across the world.

The judging will be undertaken by:

• Dr Stephen Law , editor of Think . Previously Reader in Philosophy at Heythrop College University of London, Stephen Law is now based at Oxford University Department of Continuing Education and researches in the philosophies of mind, language, metaphysics, and religion.
• Chrisantha Fernando trained in medicine at Wadham College, Oxford and worked for a couple of years as a doctor. He was fascinated by brains and evolution, so he did an MSc at Sussex in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems, followed by a PhD in simulating the origin of life with Eors Szathmary. They developed a theory of Darwinian Neurodynamics, and about 10 years ago he joined DeepMind to work on the interaction of evolution and learning. He’s now mainly interested in the origin of external representations, algorithmic creativity, and cultural evolution in large language models.

We are looking for essays of not more than 1,200 words that engage with any one of the following three themes.

• Could a machine think?
• Is it morally wrong to eat meat?
• Can I know that the world I experience is real?

The winner will be published in an issue of Think , the shortlisted candidates will win a year’s free subscription to  Think , and other prizes will be awarded to all those who make the longlist.

Your essay submission will be assessed for academic merit and rigour and we look forward to receiving your submission via the link here .

Please read the Rules of Entry below before completing the form.

1. Word documents should be submitted to the Royal Institute of Philosophy (TRIP) up to and including the deadline date of midnight on Sunday 31st March 2024.  Submissions after this date will not be accepted. 2. In order for us to consider your essay, email your Word document to [email protected] 3. Authors can be of any nationality and based anywhere in the world. They must be aged between 16-18 years old. 4. Essays must be an original work and submitted in English, using 12 pt font, double line spaced, Calibri font or similar. 5. The essay must not exceed 1,200 words. 6. There is no requirement for notes or references in your submission.  If there is a particular requirement to reference a work, then please include in your title as sub text. 7. Use one line breaks no indentations to mark new paragraphs. 8. Multiple submissions are accepted, although only one submission per topic will be considered.  If multiple submissions for the same topic are received, the first to be submitted will be the only one considered. 9. As part of the submission process an explanation from the author explaining why the work should be considered can be included. 10. Whilst there will be one overall prize winner, the Royal Institute will look to create age group categories that recognise high quality entries by age range. 11. The administration team and the judge has the final decision as to whether an essay is eligible.  No correspondence will be entered into. 12. Should the work be accepted to the longlist those authors will be advised.  Those submissions not accepted to the longlist will not be receive any correspondence from the Royal Institute. 13. The author accepts by submitting their essay to abide by the rules of the prize.  14. General enquiries about the prize should be sent to [email protected]

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International Contemporary Writing

The Wasafiri Essay Prize

The 2024 Wasafiri Essay Prize is open for submissions till 31 May, 2024.

The Wasafiri Essay Prize aims to discover, encourage, and award innovative critical essays of an exemplary standard, which constitute the most exciting academic work happening today across the field of international contemporary literature (literature published since 1965 from anywhere in the world). Early career researchers, including PhD students, from around the world are invited to submit unpublished works by 31 May, 2024.

The Wasafiri Essay Prize will reward field-leading scholarship, both in content and in attention to style and form. The judges are particularly interested in writing that is daring, accessible, and engaging without sacrificing nuance or rigour.  

The winner will be awarded:   

• Publication in Wasafiri , in print and online   
• £250 cash prize   
• A mentoring conversation with an academic on our world-class editorial board in a relevant field of study   
• An annual print and digital subscription to Wasafiri  

Wasafiri is a peer-reviewed journal of international contemporary literature, published by Routledge and listed in Clarivate Analytics’ Arts & Humanities Citation Index. All published articles have passed mutually anonymous peer review by two reviewers. The magazine has an exceptionally global readership, and has been publishing boundary-pushing, genuinely innovative academic writing for forty years.  

Submission   

Submit via the Wasafiri submission portal and select the option for your work to be submitted to the Wasafiri Essay Prize. By selecting this option, you are confirming your eligibility for the prize – you must read the full terms and conditions below before submitting.    

We very much look forward to reading your work.   

Terms and Conditions   

The essay   

• 1. The essay must be between 6,000 and 9,000 words long, including citations but excluding works-cited list.   
• 2. The essay must be written primarily in English.   
• 3. The essay must be on a subject within the field of international contemporary literature: literature published since 1965 from anywhere in the world.  
• 4. The essay must be unpublished in any form, and must not have been accepted for publication elsewhere. If the work is accepted for publication elsewhere after submission to the prize, you must inform Wasafiri at your earliest convenience so it can be withdrawn from consideration.
• 5. All entries must comply with our submissions criteria and style sheet.  

The writer    

• 6. The prize is open to PhD candidates and early career researchers, ie entrants must be enrolled on a PhD or have been awarded their PhD no more than eight years before the closing date of the prize, which this year is 31 May, 2024.
• 7. There are no restrictions on the entrant’s age, nationality, or location.  
• 8. If successful, entrants should be prepared to license copyright to Wasafiri.  

The judges   

• 10. The prize will be judged by Wasafiri’ s editorial team and board.   
• 11. Essays put forward for consideration will be anonymously peer reviewed.  
• 12. The decision of the judges will be final and no correspondence will be entered into.  
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By submitting your essay, you give the BERKELEY PRIZE the nonexclusive, perpetual right to reproduce the essay or any part of the essay, in any and all media at the BERKELEY PRIZE’s discretion.  A “nonexclusive” right means you are not restricted from publishing your paper elsewhere if you use the following attribution that must appear in that new placement: “First submitted to and/or published by the Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence ( www.BerkeleyPrize.org ) in competition year 20(--) (and if applicable) and winner of that year’s (First, Second, Third…) Essay prize.” Finally, you warrant the essay does not violate any intellectual property rights of others and indemnify the BERKELEY PRIZE against any costs, loss, or expense arising out of a violation of this warranty.

Registration and Submission

You will be asked to complete a short registration form which will not be seen by members of the BERKELEY PRIZE Committee or Jury.

REGISTER HERE.

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Home — News Archive — Reynolds Wins Prize for 2023 Essay

Reynolds Wins Prize for 2023 Essay

May 23, 2024.

In the essay, Reynolds delves into the often-overlooked histories of clergy abuse within marginalized communities, highlighting the intersection of practical theology and social justice issues. Praising her work as “compelling and insightful,” prize judges noted the essay’s innovative approach, creative argument, and strong research base, as well as Reynolds’ ability to navigate the boundaries between theology and religious history.

Reynolds was honored for the same essay in June 2023 as the winner of the Catholic Theological Society of America’s New Scholar Prize.

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Crime & Mystery

The Best Crime Novels of the Year (So Far)

Looking for some murder and mayhem (fictional, of course)? Here are the best crime novels of 2024 so far.

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By Sarah Weinman

We chose the 10 best crime novels of 2023. See the complete list .

I like Scandinavian crime fiction — the darker, the better

Under the storm , by christoffer carlsson.

When the body of a young woman is discovered in an incinerated farmhouse, resolution was swift: It was murder, her boyfriend did it, case closed. But for the boyfriend’s nephew, Isak; the arresting officer, Vidar Jörgensson; and the entire community of Marbäck, closure is a myth about to be shattered — spectacularly.

Amazon | Local bookstores | Barnes & Noble | Apple

Give me a tense, high-stakes novel that will keep me up all night

Smoke kings , by jahmal mayfield.

Can there ever be restitution for the harm done to generations of Black people in America? Mayfield takes this question to a provocative extreme in this thriller, which follows four friends as they kidnap descendants of people who long ago committed racially motivated hate crimes.

I want a historical mystery drenched in atmosphere

Rough trade , by katrina carrasco.

This is Carrasco’s second historical thriller to feature Alma Rosales, the gutsy, Pinkerton-trained opium smuggler who loves nothing more than a good brawl. The novel brims with the sights, smells and sounds of Tacoma, Wash., in 1888, full of docks, taverns and illicit back rooms where all manner of appetites are explored discreetly, where secrets swirl and betrayals come quickly.

Sure, plot’s great — but I’m more interested in character-driven stories

The hunter , by tana french.

In her follow-up to her 2020 book “ The Searcher ,” French continues to explore the dynamics of the Irish village where a retired Chicago detective, Cal Hooper, has moved. He is mentoring a local teen, Trey Reddy, when Trey’s long-disappeared father reappears, trailing a get-rich-quick scheme involving hidden gold and, inevitably, murder. French unspools her tale with patience, compassion and utter command.

I’d like a speculative Jazz Age noir

Cahokia jazz , by francis spufford.

Speculative histories have long been the terrain of Spufford’s fiction (and occasionally nonfiction). Here, he sets out to chronicle a vanished world that never had the chance to blossom, and marries it to the rhythms of hard-boiled detective fiction. Cahokia, in Spufford’s brilliant telling, is a thriving, Indigenous-led state roiling with racial tension. Then arrives the outsider detective Joe Barrow, investigating a murder that threatens to split Cahokia for good.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

An assault led to Chanel Miller’s best seller, “Know My Name,” but she had wanted to write children’s books since the second grade. She’s done that now  with “Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All.”

When Reese Witherspoon is making selections for her book club , she wants books by women, with women at the center of the action who save themselves.

The Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, who died on May 14 , specialized in exacting short stories that were novelistic in scope , spanning decades with intimacy and precision.

“The Light Eaters,” a new book by Zoë Schlanger, looks at how plants sense the world  and the agency they have in their own lives.

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

Luke Littler sends emotional message to his girlfriend after winning £275,000 Premier League prize

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Luke Littler paid an emotional tribute to his family and girlfriend after claiming Premier League Darts glory.

The Nuke will wake up this morning £275,000 richer after winning thrilling final against Luke Humphries as he gained revenge for his heartbreaking defeat in the World Championship showpiece in January with an 11-7 victory.

Littler became the first player to hit a nine-dart finish in the Premier League final since Phil Taylor did it twice in 2010 and that surely will not be the only time the teenager emulates ‘ The Power ’ over the next few years on the road to stardom.

He hit perfection in the first leg after a break with the final finely poised at 5-5 where he could relieve himself and then followed it up with a break of throw.

Littler was in tears at the end as he became the sport’s youngest ever major champion by winning its second biggest tournament on his debut, thrilling a record 14,000 fans at London’s O2 Arena.

The 17-year-old embraced his girlfriend, Eloise Milburn , after his landmark victory and later shared an emotional message praising her contribution to his success.

He wrote on X: ‘Been 17 long weeks and couldn’t have done it without all the support from my family, Eloise, Martin, sponsors and everyone in my team. Thank you for everything

Victory for ‘The Nuke’ continues an amazing story which began when he burst on to the scene at Alexandra Palace over Christmas and he has since gone on to transcend the sport.

Twelve months ago he was sitting his GCSEs; now he is one of the most famous sports stars in the country.

“One hundred per cent it is the best night of my life,” he added. “The Worlds was weird, I wasn’t disappointed and crying like I was tonight.

“I am just looking forward to all of what is to come.

“I am going to New York on Monday, but before that I am watching United in the FA Cup.”

Asked how it felt to be the youngest ever PDC major champion, he replied: “Am I? It’s just another achievement.”

It was a fitting final between the two best players in the world as an enduring rivalry continued.

Humphries may have won the biggest battle at Ally Pally but Littler   has an 8-2 winning record overall.

“Everyone is just living in a Luke world,” the world number one said. “I hope there are many more major finals between us and I think there will be.

“I think we are the two best players in the world. We have that level where we can both beat each other.

“Over the next 15, 20 years we could see many battles in major finals. I hope that is the case.”

MORE : Seven-time Premier League champion Michael van Gerwen reacts to underdog tag

MORE : Luke Littler fires shots at Arsenal, Tottenham and Chelsea ahead of London Premier League Play-Offs

MORE : Michael Smith’s renewed sense of purpose and the Vegas trip that saved his Premier League campaign

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Eleven graduating seniors honored with top yale college prizes.

Top row, from left, Maile Somera, Carter Sundown King, Ariana Reichler, Resty Fufunan, Eliza Kravitz, and Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind. Second row, from left, Jimmy Hatch, Jasselene Paz, Jordi Bertrán Ramirez, Matt Brandau, and Andrew Milas. (Photos by Dan Renzetti)

Eleven members of the Yale College Class of 2024 who distinguished themselves in the classroom, on the athletic field, and in their communities were honored with top prizes today in one of Class Day’s most treasured traditions. The prizes were awarded by Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis and other Yale leaders.

The recipients of the top five academic prizes will have the privilege of carrying an official flag or banner during the Yale Commencement procession on May 20. The winner of the Warren Memorial Prize carries the American flag. The winner of the Russell Henry Chittenden Prize carries the Connecticut flag. The winner of the Arthur Twining Hadley Prize carries the Yale College banner. The winners of the Sudler Prize carry the president’s banners. Finally, the winner of the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize carries the Yale University banner.

The names of the prizewinners, and their citations, are listed below, in the order of their presentation.

The Nellie Pratt Elliot Award

Awarded to a senior woman whose excellence on the field of play, and in her life at Yale, best represents the highest ideals of American sportsmanship and Yale tradition .

MAILE SOMERA, Pierson College

“ Maile Somera is the team captain of the 3-time Ivy League championship volleyball team, which won the Ivy League tournament this year for the second year in a row. She was the 2023 Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year and is 2nd All-time at Yale in number of aces served to opponents — who watched the balls whiz by, unable to return them. And, Maile is graduating with distinction in her Architecture major!

“ In recognition of her record as a fearless opponent, a consummate leader, a fine student, and a selfless example, Yale College is proud to award the Nellie Elliott Award to Maile Somera.”

The William Neely Mallory Award

Awarded to a senior man whose excellence on the field of play, and in his life at Yale, best represents the highest ideals of American sportsmanship and Yale tradition .

MATT BRANDAU, Benjamin Franklin College

“ Matt Brandau is a 3-time NCAA tournament participant, a 3-time All-American, the 2023 New England Player of the Year, the All-time leading scorer in Yale men’s lacrosse and the All-time leading scorer in Ivy League history, and the 2024 Ivy League Player of the Year.

“ For his truly extraordinary athletic accomplishments, and for the qualities that make him a quintessential teammate, and the epitome of the scholar-athlete ideal, Yale College takes pride in honoring him with the William Neely Mallory Award.”

The Nakanishi Prize

Awarded to two graduating seniors who, while maintaining high academic achievement, have provided exemplary leadership in enhancing race or ethnic relations at Yale College .

RESTY FUFUNAN, Trumbull College

“ Resty Fufunan has embodied the Nakanishi Prize through his activism, grounded in equal parts of listening, critical thinking, and hard, pragmatic work. He has been a community builder through his many roles on campus, among them First-Year Counselor, Co-Head Counselor for Camp Yale’s Cultural Connections program, and choreographer and dancer for DanceWorks. Thanks to him, this community has become more open and welcoming.

“ Resty has also been a pillar of the Asian American community. He has served as a first-year liaison; President of the Filipino student organization, Kasama; student co-head of the Asian American Cultural Center; and co-moderator of the Asian American Students Alliance. He has coordinated an inter-group trip to Washington, D.C., to protest the Supreme Court's oral arguments in cases about affirmative action, in the process building a foundation for future coalitions on ethnic relations and advocacy.

“ Resty’s two majors — Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Data Science — have enabled him to promote ethnic and racial relations by focusing on the policy intersections between data and social justice. He has also applied that knowledge through internships, analyzing census data to prepare a national survey of Asian American voters. Now that he is graduating, he will continue his studies in China next year as the recipient of a Richard U. Light Fellowship.

“ For his transformational work advancing ethnic and race relations, and his unforgettable impact on ethnic relations in our community, Yale College is proud to bestow the Nakanishi Prize upon Resty Fufunan.”

JASSELENE PAZ, Silliman College

“ Jasselene Paz is a community builder who has forged partnerships, re-examined histories, and created new communities for Yale’s campus culture. She has dedicated herself to making Yale a place where multiple and intersecting identities — around race, gender, sexuality and ethnicities — can take root, bloom, and flourish.

“ Jasselene is the founder and president of Central Americans for Empowerment; a radio host with WYBCx Yale Radio; a co-head counselor for Camp Yale’s Cultural Connections program; a Peer Liaison for La Casa Cultural; a Silliman Latine Affinity Group Co-Founder & Event Coordinator; a dancer and leader in the dance groups Sabrosura and Rhythmic Blue; and a Community Consent Educator.

“ An Ethnicity, Race, & Migration major and a Human Rights scholar, Jasselene has brought the theory and practice of community building to a global context. She has studied at Yonsei University, South Korea, as a recipient of a Richard U. Light Fellowship, and also in Cartagena, Colombia, working with community members and organizations to understand how the country’s armed conflict and its subsequent 2016 Peace Accords have affected Black, Indigenous, Brown, urban, rural, and gender- marginalized communities.

“ For her many contributions to Yale’s campus culture, Yale College is honored to bestow the Nakanishi Prize upon Jasselene Paz.”

The James Andrew Haas Prize

Awarded to that member of the senior class in Yale College whose breadth of intellectual achievement, strength of character, and fundamental humanity shall be adjudged by the faculty to have provided leadership for his or her fellow students, inspiring in them a love of learning and concern for others .

JIMMY HATCH, Timothy Dwight College

“ Jimmy Hatch entered Yale at the age of 52, after a long and distinguished career as a Navy SEAL in the United States military. He graduates with a degree in Humanities, concluding an undergraduate career that began in Directed Studies — he was the first Eli Whitney student to enroll in the program — and culminating in a senior thesis exploring the interplay between literature and lived experience, with a particular focus on depictions of combat in classical Greek, Roman, and Italian texts.

“ Jimmy’s extracurricular life on campus has been rich and varied, ranging from his partnership with the Jackson School in creating an “After Action’ class immediately following the U.S. exit from Afghanistan to his collaboration with the Yale University Art Gallery on a ‘Public Plato’ project, for which he recently hosted a conversation with Dean Tamar Gendler on ‘Ancient Thinking and the Modern Human.’

“ Jimmy is invested in the life of the mind, in the creation of community, in often winding pursuit of light and truth. For the depth and breadth of his commitments, Yale College is proud to bestow the James Andrew Haas Memorial Prize upon James Hatch.”

The Warren Memorial Prize

Awarded to the senior majoring in the humanities who ranks highest in scholarship .

ELIZA KRAVITZ, Morse College

“ Eliza Kravitz graduates summa cum laude with distinction in her History major. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year, she is also a member of the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society. Eliza is a recipient of the Yale Review of International Studies Acheson Prize for her essay in international affairs. This year, she also received the Carlos R. Morena Prize, given annually to the best student paper focusing on the field of Latinx Studies.

“ Outside the classroom, Eliza has made a significant impact in the surrounding communities of Connecticut. As a first-year student, she helped students incarcerated in the Manson Youth Institution pass the GED. She has also volunteered as a tax preparer with organizations that assist under-served families in preparing their taxes, and she has worked as a Spanish interpreter for the New Haven Legal Assistance Association.

“ In recognition of her extraordinary scholarly achievements, Yale College is proud to award the Warren Memorial High Scholarship Prize this year to Eliza Rose Kravitz.”

The Arthur Twining Hadley Prize

Awarded to the senior in Yale College majoring in the social sciences who ranks highest in scholarship .

ARIANA REICHLER, Trumbull College

“ Ariana Reichler was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year and graduates summa cum laude with distinction in her major, Cognitive Science, and a certificate in Education Studies. Her academic pursuits have been broad and interdisciplinary, with a steady focus on cognitive development.

“ As a member of theClinical Affective Neuroscience & Development Lab since her sophomore year, Ariana’s research has focused on child and adolescent development and its intersection with mental health, specifically examining mechanisms linking childhood adversity exposure with risk for posttraumatic stress disorder.

“ Outside of the classroom, Ariana’s extracurricular commitments have often focused on children, too. From serving as a Community Mental Health Fellow with Dwight Hall and the Connecticut Mental Health Center Foundation to volunteering as a swim instructor to local children with special needs or disabilities, Ariana has made a significant impact in the broader New Haven community.

“ For her exceptional scholarship, Yale College proudly awards the Arthur Twining Hadley Prize to Ariana Reichler.”

The Russell Henry Chittenden Prize

Awarded to the senior majoring in the natural sciences or in mathematics who ranks highest in scholarship .

ANDREW MILAS, Grace Hopper College

“ Andrew Milas graduates summa cum laude, with distinction in both his majors, Computer Science and Mathematics. He has distinguished himself as one of the most outstanding scholars in his fields of study, showing extraordinary talent in his demanding coursework, much of it at the graduate level, and far exceeding the requirements for the major or the undergraduate degree. Whether studying economics or artificial intelligence, deep learning theory or statistics and data science, he has done, in the words of one of his instructors, ‘spectacularly.’

“ Andrew is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, among them a first-place win in the Jane Street Electronic Trading Challenge Final Hour. At the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, he and his teammates took fifth place in the 2022 Putnam Exam, he received an honorable mention, and Yale’s Department of Mathematics praised Andrew and his team as placing Yale among ‘the top five for the first time since 1991,’ a first in over three decades.

“ For his exceptional scholarship and future promise in his field, Yale College proudly awards the Russell Henry Chittenden Prize to Andrew Milas.”

The Louis Sudler Prize

Awarded to two seniors for excellence in the performing or creative arts .

CARTER SUNDOWN KING, Pauli Murray College

“ Carter Sundown King graduates with distinction in his major, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Admired by faculty and students alike, he is not only a costume designer who raises the standard of every production he joins; he also has a deep respect for the materials, histories, and bodies with which he works. Moving between rigorous research and ‘intuitive leaps of the imagination’ his costumes demand to be seen and understood.

“ An enrolled member of the Oneida Nation, Carter King's design practice centers his Oneida experience, drawing on lessons in creativity, community, integrity, and ingenuity he learned while being raised on the Oneida Nation Reservation in Wisconsin. If you find yourself anywhere in his vicinity, you cannot help but notice him. He wears his Nation and his art form everywhere he goes, teaching us all how to carry elements of what we love with us, on our very bodies.

“ For his unwavering dedication to the highest standards of his art form, Yale College is honored to award the Louis Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Performing and Creative Arts to Carter Sundown King.”

JORDI BERTRÁN RAMIREZ, Trumbull College

“ Jordi Bertrán Ramirez of Trumbull College graduates with a double major in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and in History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health. In his doubled studies he has investigated popular and political cultures of information, identity, and representation, using not only classrooms and computers but also stages, voices, and bodies to explore urgent questions.

“ Anyone who has seen Jordi on stage (in his over 30 productions at Yale), knows that he has ‘It’ — the ‘it’ of a theater actor’s magnetic force that compels audiences to watch and listen; the ‘it’ of an actor’s grace, charisma, and artistic intelligence; the ‘it’ that Professor Joseph Roach has called ‘easy to perceive but hard to define, possessed by abnormally interesting people.’ Jordi is not only such a person; he brings his own interests and ethics alive in his performances; he plays the stage as a virtuoso plays the piano; he channels his talent into projects that matter — to him, to his community, and to our changing and challenging world.

“ For his luminous accomplishments in theatrical performance, Yale College is honored to award the Louis Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Performing and Creative Arts to Jordi Bertrán Ramirez.”

The Alpheus Henry Snow Prize

Awarded to the senior who through the combination of intellectual achievement, character, and personality, shall be adjudged by the faculty to have done most for Yale by inspiring in his or her classmates an admiration for the traditions of high scholarship .

XAVIER BLACKWELL-LIPKIND, Davenport College

“ Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind graduates summa cum laude and with distinction in his major, Comparative Literature. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and serving as its president in his senior year, Xavier has also completed an Advanced Language Certificate in French. Next year, he will pursue a Masters in Comparative Literature at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar.

“ Xavier has devoted much of his undergraduate years exploring languages. He has received numerous awards for his work in Spanish, French, and Portuguese, including the Scott Prize for the best essay in French and the Bildner Prize for ‘an outstanding essay in Spanish on any subject in Latin American Literature and/or Culture.’ The English department has also recognized Xavier, twice awarding him the John Hubbard Curtis Prize ‘for love of the English language and facility in writing’ as well as the sophomore C. Wyllys Betts Prize and the Elmore A. Willets Prize for Fiction. His love of languages continues with ongoing study of Italian and Amharic.

“ Awards from outside Yale have also been bestowed on Xavier for his fiction and non-fiction prose stories, which have been published in literary journals such as The Threepenny Review, The Drift, Gulf Coast, West Branch, and Brevity, to name just a few. He won the Editors’ Prize in Prose from the Copper Nickel.

“ Xavier’s deep belief in the value of language and literature ties directly to his enthusiastic service as a mentor to others. On campus, Xavier tutors students in French and Portuguese. In the New Haven community, he uses his talents and expertise to serve as a volunteer translator and interpreter for immigration nonprofits and asylum attorneys.

“ Xavier has contributed to the life of Yale through his writing as well. Since May 2023, he has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Literary Magazine, having previously occupied the roles of managing editor and literary editor. In addition, he has worked as a staff writer for the Yale Daily News Magazine and as a reporter for the YDN. Somehow, he has also played the viola in the Yale Symphony Orchestra for two years.

“ For his remarkable achievements and his promise for the many more to come, Yale College takes great pleasure in bestowing the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize upon Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind.”

• Commencement 2024: A celebration of community
• Yale College 2024: Meet some of the graduates
• ‘Until we meet again’ — Baccalaureate and Class Day at Yale

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Notable deaths of 2024, so far

Notable deaths of 2024: Remembering those who have died, so far, this year.

Notable deaths of 2024: Remembering Iris Apfel, Carl Weathers, Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, Joseph Lieberman and others who have died, so far, this year.

Glynis Johns

Jan. 4, age 100 | British actress, who became a film star in the late 1940s playing a flirty mermaid named Miranda, portrayed a singing suffragist in the Disney musical “Mary Poppins” and won a Tony Award in the musical “A Little Night Music,” where she introduced Stephen Sondheim’s standard “Send in the Clowns.” | Read more

Joseph Lelyveld

Jan. 5, age 86 | Journalist, who rose from copy boy to top editor at the New York Times, where he distinguished himself as the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about apartheid South Africa and where he sought to carry the bedrock values of journalism into the digital age. | Read more

Mario Zagallo

Jan. 5, age 92 | Soccer player, who won two World Cups as a player, one as a coach and another as an assistant coach for Brazil. He was the first person to win the World Cup both as a player and a manager, as well as the only person to win four World Cup titles in various roles. (Pictured, center) | Read more

Joan Acocella

Jan. 7, age 78 | Cultural critic, whose essays for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books — by turns stylish, erudite, droll and self-effacing — established her as an indispensable guide to modern dance and literature. | Read more

Joyce Randolph

Jan. 13, age 99 | Actress best remembered for playing Trixie Norton, the disapproving Brooklynite wife of a sewer worker, on the influential 1950s variety-show skit and sitcom “The Honeymooners.” (Pictured, right) | Read more

Jan. 13, age 79 | Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The Washington Post, who brought incisive and barbed wit to coverage of the small screen and chronicled the medium as an increasingly powerful cultural force, for better and worse. | Read more

Marnia Lazreg

Jan. 13, age 83 | Author and scholar, who used her experiences in French colonial Algeria as starting points for studies into the struggles and aspirations of women across the Muslim world, including her stance decrying the traditions of Islamic coverings such as headscarves. | Read more

ABilly S. Jones-Hennin

Jan. 19, age 81 | Longtime advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, who co-founded the first national organization for Black lesbians and gays and coordinated logistics for the first national LGBTQ+ march on Washington. (Pictured, left) | Read more

Jan. 19, age 75 | Her yearning vocals and street-smart vibe as lead singer of the Shangri-Las brought an edgier style to the girl-group era of the 1960s with such hits as “Leader of the Pack,” and she then mostly left music for decades until returning with a solo album in her 50s. (Pictured, center) | Read more

Dexter Scott King

Jan. 22, age 62 | Younger son of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, who worked to preserve his father’s legacy. | Read more

Arno Penzias

Jan. 22, age 90 | Physicist, who fled Nazi Germany in childhood, settled in the United States and in 1978 shared the Nobel Prize in physics for helping find vital early evidence supporting the big-bang theory of the creation of the universe. (Pictured, right) | Read more

Charles Osgood

Jan. 23, age 91 | Newsman who spent 22 years anchoring the CBS-TV staple “Sunday Morning” and decades as a radio commentator, and who carved a distinct place for himself in broadcasting by occasionally presenting the news in wry doggerel. | Read more

Jan. 23, age 93 | Journalist and historian who unlocked the hidden world of cryptology in his best-selling 1967 book “The Codebreakers” and became a preeminent scholar of signals intelligence, revered even among the keepers of the secrets he revealed. | Read more

N. Scott Momaday

Jan. 24, age 89 | Author, literature professor and member of the Kiowa Indian tribe, who became the first Native American to win a Pulitzer Prize — for his 1968 debut novel, “House Made of Dawn” — and helped inspire a flowering of contemporary Native American literature. | Read more

Chita Rivera

Jan. 30, age 91 | Vivacious Broadway musical star, who originated roles in “West Side Story,” “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Chicago” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” won two competitive Tony Awards and became one of the most honored Latina entertainers of her generation. (Pictured, left) | Read more

Jean Carnahan

Jan. 30, age 90 | Former U.S. senator, who became the first female senator to represent Missouri after she was appointed to replace her husband following his death in a plane crash. | Read more

Hinton Battle

Jan. 30, age 67 | Dancer, singer, actor and choreographer, who urged audiences to “Ease on Down the Road” as the Scarecrow in Broadway’s “The Wiz” and who later won three Tony Awards while performing acrobatic leaps, percussive taps and 190-degree kicks across the stage and screen. (Pictured, right) | Read more

Ellen Gilchrist

Jan. 30, age 88 | National Book Award-winning author, who channeled the people and places of the American South in wry and poignant prose, populating her novels and stories with independent-minded women who — like the author herself — resisted being forced into traditional roles as demure debutantes, wives and mothers. | Read more

Carl Weathers

Feb. 1, age 76 | Former NFL linebacker turned muscle-flexing actor in action fare, memorably as nemesis-turned-ally Apollo Creed in the “Rocky” franchise. (Pictured, right) | Read more

Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez

Feb. 2, age 75 | American soprano, who had recently established herself as an opera singer in real life when she was cast by a French director to play one on-screen in the 1981 movie “Diva,” a cult film that lodged her in the memory of generations of art house audiences. | Read more

Brooke Ellison

Feb. 4, age 45 | Disability rights activist, who was paralyzed from the neck down in an accident at age 11, graduated from Harvard University and became a professor and advocate for people with disabilities. | Read more

Feb. 5, age 62 | Toby Keith, a former rodeo hand, oil rigger and semipro football player who became a rowdy king of country music, singing patriotic anthems, wry drinking songs and propulsive odes to cowboy culture that collectively sold more than 40 million records. | Read more | See more photos

Seiji Ozawa

Feb. 6, age 88 | Shaggy-haired, high-voltage Japanese maestro, who served as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for almost 30 years and was among the first Asian conductors to win world renown leading a classical orchestra. | Read more

Anthony Epstein

Feb. 6, age 102 | British pathologist, whose chance attendance at a lecture on childhood tumors in Africa began years of scientific sleuthing that led to the discovery of the ultra-common Epstein-Barr virus and opened expansive research into its viral links to cancers and other chronic ailments. | Read more

Feb. 10, age 96 | He helped create the on-the-go breakfast as an inventor of Pop-Tarts, leading the Michigan baking team that developed an unpretentious, toaster-friendly pastry with a fruity filling and ineffable space-age sweetness. | Read more

Alexei Navalny

Feb. 16, age 47 | Steely Russian lawyer, who exposed corruption, self-dealing and abuse of power by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies, sustaining a popular challenge to Putin for more than a decade despite constant pressure from the authorities and a near-fatal poisoning. | Read more | See more photos

Lefty Driesell

Feb. 17, age 92 | Head coach, who, in 17 seasons, built the University of Maryland into a college basketball power with ACC and NIT titles. | Read more

Princess Ira von Fürstenberg

Feb. 18, age 83 | Doe-eyed bon vivant, who first dazzled paparazzi as a teen bride of a playboy prince and who became an epitome of jet-set glamour and intrigue as a model in Paris, a movie temptress and a globe-trotting socialite who mingled with royalty, rogues and celebrities. | Read more

Hydeia Broadbent

Feb. 20, age 39 | She was born with HIV and spent nearly her entire life — ever since she was a young girl — as an advocate for HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention. | Read more

Roger Guillemin

Feb. 21, age 100 | Nobel Prize-winning physician, whose work on hormones produced by the brain helped lead to the development of the birth control pill and treatments for prostate and other cancers, and who engaged for decades in a famously scathing but productive scientific rivalry. | Read more

Roni Stoneman

Feb. 22, age 85 | The “first lady of the banjo,” who picked her way into bluegrass and country music history as a member of the Stoneman Family band and found wider fame as an irascible performer on “Hee Haw,” the down-home variety show. | Read more

Irene Camber

Feb. 23, age 98 | Italian fencer whose elegant wielding of the foil earned her a gold medal at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki and an enduring reputation as a grande dame of her sport. | Read more

Richard Lewis

Feb. 27, age 76 | Black-clad stand-up comic, who mined guilt, anxiety and neurosis for laughs — naming some of his cable specials “I’m in Pain,” “I’m Exhausted” and “I’m Doomed” — and played a semi-fictionalized version of himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” | Read more

Feb. 28, age 102 | Holocaust survivor, who endured years in Nazi concentration camps and two death marches before settling in Skokie, Ill., where he helped rally opposition to a planned neo-Nazi demonstration in the late 1970s that produced one of the most explosive cases in First Amendment law. | Read more

March 1, age 102 | New York textile designer, socialite and self-described “geriatric starlet,” who became an unlikely fashion celebrity in her 80s for her outré style. | Read more | See more photos

Juli Lynne Charlot

March 3, age 101 | Creator of ’50s “poodle skirt’” fad, a simple idea for the Christmas party outfit that turned into one of the defining looks of an era. | Read more

David E. Harris

March 8, age 89 | Former Air Force flier, who in the 1960s became the first Black pilot for a major U.S. passenger airline after battles by others to enter the industry, including a landmark anti-discrimination claim backed by the Supreme Court. | Read more

Dorie Ladner

March 11, age 81 | Dorie Ladner, who joined the civil rights movement as a teenager in Mississippi, braving gunfire, tear gas, police dogs and Ku Klux Klansmen in an undaunted campaign for racial equality. | Read more

Paul Alexander

March 11, age 78 | He was stricken with polio at age 6, earned a law degree and wrote a 2020 memoir about his life using the iron lung chamber to help him breathe. | Read more

David Mixner

March 11, age 77 | Political strategist, who helped move gay rights to the center of American politics and put his long friendship with Bill Clinton on the line over the president’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring gay people from serving openly in the military. | Read more

Helma Goldmark

March 15, age 98 | Holocaust refugee, who joined resistance, fled her native Austria and made her way to Italy, where as a teen she helped secure supplies for an operation that produced false documents for Jewish refugees. | Read more

Betty Cole Dukert

March 16, age 96 | Producer, who spent four decades as a behind-the-scenes power of the NBC weekly public affairs show “Meet the Press,” rising to executive producer of the program and helping secure guests spanning the ideological spectrum from Fidel Castro to Ross Perot. | Read more

Rose Dugdale

March 18, age 82 | English heiress, and debutante at a 1958 Buckingham Palace ball, who in 1974 was masterminding plots for the Irish Republican Army. | Read more

Martin Greenfield

March 20, age 95 | Tailor to presidents and stars, who, unbeknownst to many of his celebrity clients, learned his craft at Auschwitz and who came to America as his family’s sole survivor of the Holocaust. | Read more

Peter G. Angelos

March 23, age 94 | Baltimore lawyer, who won hundreds of millions of dollars for workers injured by exposure to asbestos, then became wider known to the public as the combative chief owner of the Baltimore Orioles for three decades. | Read more

Joseph Lieberman

March 27, age 82 | A doggedly independent four-term U.S. senator from Connecticut who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000, becoming the first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party. (Pictured, right) | Read more | See more photos

Louis Gossett Jr.

March 29, age 87 | Actor, who brought authority to hundreds of screen roles, winning an Oscar as a Marine drill instructor in “An Officer and a Gentleman” and an Emmy Award as a wise, older guide to the enslaved Kunta Kinte in the groundbreaking miniseries “Roots.” (Pictured, left) | Read more | See more photos

April 1, age 102 | Navy lieutenant commander and the last living survivor of the USS Arizona battleship, which exploded and sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. | Read more

O.J. Simpson

April 10, age 76 | Football superstar, who became a symbol of domestic violence and racial division after he was found not guilty of murdering his ex-wife and her friend in a trial that riveted the nation and had legal and cultural repercussions for years afterward. | Read more | See more photos

Notable deaths of 2023

Photo editing by Stephen Cook, Jennifer Beeson Gregory and Dee Swann. Copy editing by Shibani Shah.