Suffragette journalist Rebecca West honoured with University of Oxford writing prize

The second Rebecca West Prize for Writing was awarded to Sophie Hardcastle, a visiting Provosts Scholar at Worcester College, at a ceremony at St Edmund Hall on Friday 1 June 2018. Read Sophie’s winning essay: Where The Voices Aren’t: moral accountability at the end of the earth.

The panel also selected a runner-up: Amy Holguin, an undergraduate in Archaeology and Anthropology at Hertford College for her essay Beauty and the Beasts: Rethinking fantastical paradigms that cast women as damsels in distress, in need of being saved from agentless men in a global context.

These annual prizes of £1,000 and £500 have been established at St Edmund Hall by the Rebecca West Literary Estate, to celebrate the writing, life and achievements of Dame Rebecca West. Rebecca West (1892-1983) has been called “the world’s number one woman writer”, “the greatest woman since Elizabeth I” and “a strong contender for woman of the century”. As a young woman she was a fiery suffragette and socialist; by her thirties, she was a world-famous journalist and political analyst as well as a distinguished novelist.

All students at the University of Oxford can apply by submitting a piece of writing of 2,000-2,500 words on a topic related to Rebecca West’s interests, set each year by an International Panel. The topic for 2018’s prize was ‘Are Men (still) Beasts? : Rebecca West’s legacy in the time of #metoo’.

The International Rebecca West Panel this year consisted of Mrs Helen Atkinson, alumna of St Edmund Hall (1983, English) and great-niece of Rebecca West; Professor Ann Holbrook, Professor of English at Anselm College, US, and President of the International Rebecca West Society; and Professor Wes Williams, Fellow of St Edmund Hall.