Congratulations to Renée Orleans-Lindsay, who has been awarded this year’s Shelley-Mills prize for her essay ‘No-place, no roots, no mother: Subversive maps and family trees in The Tempest and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother’. The Shelley-Mills Prize aims to promote the study of the works of William Shakespeare. The subject for 2024-25 was ‘Shakespeare and the natural world’.
Renée Orleans-Lindsay commented: "I am incredibly honoured to have been awarded this year's Shelley-Mills Prize. The theme of 'Shakespeare and the natural world' prompted me to think experimentally about the strange, musical island that Shakespeare imagined in The Tempest. My own Ghanaian heritage piqued my interest in a comparison with Saidiya Hartman's 2006 travelogue through Ghana's slave sites, where I encountered the Twi proverb 'dua hon mire' (a mushroom that grows on the tree has no deep soil). This proverb proved incredibly useful for considering how the sensory and geographical disorientation in The Tempest might be surprisingly reimagined. I'm very grateful to the Faculty for this opportunity to engage with Shakespeare's richly complex representations of space and environment".
You can read the winning essay here.
