Congratulations to our 2025 shortlist!
Eleanor Careless, Jade French, Louis Klee and Hannah Lucas
Shortlist Overview
Eleanor Careless, Incarceration in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn: Serve Your Own Sentences (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)
Institutional affiliation: University of Sussex
This first monograph on the works of Anna Mendelssohn (1948–2009) is a compelling and intellectually ambitious archival study that reaches well beyond a single-author recovery project. Drawing a rich web of connections between authors and different national-geographical contexts to illuminate Mendelssohn’s inspirations – especially Nancy Cunard, Muriel Rukeyser and Denise Riley – the monograph situates Mendelssohn’s work in relation to modernism, radical Jewish traditions, feminist poetics and the contemporary prison abolition movement, as well as key historical moments including the Spanish Civil War, Nazi concentration camps, Women’s Liberation Movement, and Mendelssohn’s own 1970s imprisonment for political activism. The book advances a nuanced and rigorous thesis about poetry and imprisonment which attends with patience and great intelligence to the history of lyric and its associations with confinement, encapsulated in Careless’ declared interest in ‘the sentence, as a unit both of grammar and of carcerality’.
This superbly achieved historical and theoretical discussion and often very moving account of Mendelssohn’s life and oeuvre is also timely, in conversation with scholar-activist debates on the enduring legacies of and resistance to fascism, the power of the archive, and abolitionism.
Jade Elizabeth French, Modernist Poetics of Ageing: The Late Lives and Late Styles of Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and H.D. (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Institutional affiliation: Loughborough University
This is a very impressive book, rich in detail and clearly the result of a huge amount of archival research. Focusing on the later work of Mina Loy, H.D. and Djuna Barnes, French moves our understanding of the Modernist or even late-Modernist period, developing the discussion to those books considered outside of the accepted canon of Modernist work. Attentive to the various contexts of ‘lateness’ discernible in the texts, French engages in critically astute readings of the later works of these writers avoiding the pitfalls of a reductive biographical approach while still paying close attention to their individual ‘life-stories’ and the creative life-cycle.
Drawing on unpublished material and letters (Mina Loy), H.D.’s notebooks and letters, numerous drafts of Barnes’s poetry and a significant archive of correspondence has enabled French to consider the poets’ experiences of ageing and their representations of that process in published works.
In short, this is a richly researched and clearly argued piece of scholarship that breaks new critical ground for modernist studies in the twenty-first century.
Louis Klee, The Constellational Novel (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Institutional affiliation: University of Cambridge
This is an original, significant and rigorous piece of scholarship on the relationship between the contemporary novel and ethics. It offers a theoretically incisive examination of a new kind of novel form, what the author labels the ‘constellational novel’, opening up new ways to think about the contemporary novel and reading. It is significant in bringing together ideas of novel form allied to ethics, and a phenomenology of reading that focuses on association and affinity rather than characterological alterity. It is rigorous in intellectual scope and the way in which it models constellational modes of reading through engagement with a set of inter-related and highly allusive primary texts (Proust, Sebald, Teju Cole, Lisa Robertson).
The monograph consists of an initial theoretical and critical chapter followed by intensive readings of the constellational novels under consideration alongside extensive reference to works, philosophical, critical and creative, that respond to these works, creating their own constellations. In short, this is a learned, deeply researched, theoretically astute piece of scholarship.
Hannah Lucas, Impossible Recovery: Julian of Norwich and the Phenomenology of Well-Being (Columbia University Press, 2025).
Institutional affiliation: University of Cambridge
Impossible Recovery presents a major new phenomenologically framed account of Julian of Norwich, the theologian and first known woman to author a book in English, Revelations of Divine Love. In this rigorously researched and intellectually expansive examination of the ‘entanglement of illness and revelation’ and their reception, visionary writings are not arcane theological texts but a relevant, relatable and profoundly poetic ‘deeply existential meditation on what it means to be, live, and die well in the world’. Part of the ‘medieval turn’ in critical theory, the book constructs a rich philosophical framework within which to resourcefully close-read an important medieval text as precursor to modern theories of well-being. Impressive medieval scholarship and deep theoretical and philosophical knowledge are lightly worn in a book that responds to Julian’s twenty-first century importance in popular spirituality, medical and health humanities, and pandemic cultures. Resisting contemporary political weaponizing of the Middle Ages to reframe Julian’s Revelations and theology as ‘paramodern’ ‘proto-phenomenology’, Impossible Recovery is a timely and exciting interdisciplinary study.
