Dr Noreen Masud, Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature, has been awarded the Modernist Studies Association's First Book Prize for her monograph Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language (Oxford University Press, 2022). 

The judging committee noted that "One wouldn’t expect a book tightly focused on a single poet and a small form to feel expansive, but this is precisely the case with Noreen Masud’s delightful and inventive Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language...One need not be versed in Stevie Smith or even in poetry to love reading this quirky and surprising book."

The prestigious prize was announced at the MSA conference in Brooklyn, New York, where Dr Doug Battersby (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow) was also shortlisted for Troubling Late Modernism: Ethics, Feeling, and the Novel Form.