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Welcome to the new Katherine Mansfield Society website!
We hope you will find our new website easy to use, and we will be adding more and more features and content to it over the coming months. In the meantime, if there is anything you used to access via the KMS website which you can no longer find, please select the ‘Archive’ link in the menu to see a copy of the website as it was in April 2021.
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KATHERINE MANSFIELD SOCIETY ESSAY PRIZE COMPETITION 2025: RESULT
The co-editors of the Katherine Mansfield Studies book series are pleased to announce that the 2025 Katherine Mansfield Society Essay Prize, with a value of £200, for a scholarly essay on the theme of Katherine Mansfield’s Men, has been awarded to Dr Kostas Boyiopoulos, Durham University, UK, for his essay ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Vicarious Decadence: Arthur Symons, Artifice and Performance’. The judges, Dr Andrew Harrison, Kathleen Jones and Dr Martin Griffiths, found this to be a very assured, stimulating and well-researched essay on the young Mansfield’s immersive engagement with Symons and with Decadent writing more generally. As the Chair of the Judges, Dr Andrew Harrison, noted, its focus on Mansfield’s interest in performativity, the melding of different subjectivities, and the dissolving of gender boundaries is deftly handled; the essay illuminates Mansfield’s early writing, while also casting a fresh light on famous and much-discussed later stories such as ‘Miss Brill’, ‘Bliss’ and ‘The Garden Party’. The judges would also like to highly commend John Wood’s essay, ‘“Nothing Happens Suddenly”: Mansfield, A. R. Orage and the Esoteric’, for the new insights it offers concerning Orage’s importance in Mansfield’s life, and his impact on her writing: it provides a welcome counterblast to John Middleton Murry’s dismissive attitude to Orage and to the mystical. Both essays will appear in volume 18 of Katherine Mansfield Studies, titled Katherine Mansfield’s Men, to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2026.