Dr Harriet Soper has been awarded the 2024 University English Book Prize for her book The Life Course in Old English Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2024) at the 'English: Shared Futures' conference in York. Judges praised the book as 'entirely original' and for its 'interpretations of subtle and complicated literary texts...written in a scholarly yet accessible manner'. They write further:

In terms of rigour, it builds on previous scholarship, producing new readings through analysis of intertexts/parallel texts, bringing to bear new frames of reference to the considerable corpus of works analysed. The impressive ‘A Note on the Chronology of Old English Poetry’ that begins Soper’s book (pp.xii-xiv), serves to establish just such a rigorous, tested foundation. The book that follows really builds on, and takes further, that commitment to grounding out its enterprise and analysis all the way through. Consisting of four substantive chapters in addition to a carefully crafted introduction and conclusion, the book “is structured around transitional phases in the life course as depicted in Old English poetry, especially the process of becoming fully shaped by others early in life, the metamorphoses by which youth can become mature adulthood, the experience of feeling oneself to be old and living in the absence of loved ones, and entry into the suspended and unresolved condition of the death state” (Soper 2024, p. 5). The main text is followed by extensive notes and a large bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Dr Mary Bateman's Local Places and the Arthurian Tradition in England and Wales, 1400-1700 and Dr Erin Forbes's Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793–1845 were also recognised in shortlists for the 2023 and 2024 prizes. 

You can read more on the Prize here, and discover more on Dr Soper's work and teaching here.