Congratulations to Ben Cooper (St Anne’s) for winning the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize 2025 with their essay titled: '“Millions of Strange Shadows”: Poetry and the Uses of the Shade'. The essay subject for 2025 was: ‘Shadows’.
The judges said: "We admired the shapely essay ‘Millions of Strange Shadows’ for its ambitious scope (effortlessly ranging from Milton to Shakespeare to Shelley to Bishop to Hill), its generous close reading, and its inventive use of ‘shadow’ as a heuristic tool. Allusion was cleverly presented as a kind of shadowing, typographic shadows were brilliantly illuminated, and the aural shadowing provided by puns and other sound patterns were ingeniously tracked down. The essay also captured the existential significance of much of these shadows, sensitively drawing out the elements of loss and mourning, alongside the limits of the perceptible and the sayable in Hill’s poem ‘Pisgah.’ A performance, then, of great creativity, wit and range, and a deserving winner of the 2025 Chancellor’s prize."
Ben commented: "It is an honour to receive the prize. I had great fun writing this essay, and would like to offer my thanks to the panel of readers in the English Faculty!"
Congratulations also to Paul Norris (Brasenose) who was awarded proxime/second place for their essay titled: 'Thicker Light'
The judges said: "This was a highly assured and scholarly performance that brilliantly explored the role of shadow as a conceit and method in Donne – the function of ‘shadow images,’ ‘shadow-lines,’ and ‘shadow senses’ in Donne’s ‘Lecture Upon the Shadow.’ It brings an impressive sense of intellectual context to bear on the poem and has a lovely sense of the generic differences between lectures and poetry - differences that Donne both draws upon and disrupts. The enlistment of Ashbery at the end is hugely insightful and allows the epistemic and moral resonances of shadows in Donne to be fully drawn out. The essay is beautifully paced, clearly written and immaculately referenced. Indeed, much of it is of a publishable standard."
Paul Norris commented: "I am very pleased to have been recognised for this essay. It was a delight to write, the prompt being a stimulating one for approaching Donne’s poems and sermons, and Donne himself being a figure of many shadows."
