Congratulations to Nick Smart of New College who has been named the winner of the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize 2022. This year’s subject was ‘Arnold, with his determination to free his compatriots from the mental shackles of bad religion, capitalism, and self-satisfied nationalism, remains a little too recognizable. His bugbears are our bugbears, and his pitfalls remain our own (Sebastian Lecourt)’.
Nicholas Smart is a DPhil student at New College. Originally from the West Country, his dissertation explores T. S. Eliot and the construction of reputation, and is supervised by Dr Hannah Sullivan. More broadly, his research is interested in how poetry works, why and how we read it, and the use of criticism in the modern world.
