PRESS RELEASE Katherine Mansfield Society Essay Prize Competition Winner 2015

4 October 2015

PRESS RELEASE Katherine Mansfield Society Essay Prize Competition Winner 2015

The Katherine Mansfield Society is delighted to announce that this year's prize for the best essay on the theme of 'Katherine Mansfield and Psychology’ has been awarded to Polly Dickson. The judges, Professor Laura Marcus (Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford), Dr Isobel Maddison (Director of Studies in English, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge) and Professor Clare Hanson (Professor of Twentieth Century Literature, University of Southampton) were unanimous in choosing this essay from a wide field of excellent entries.

Chair of the Judging Panel Professor Clare Hanson comments: 'Polly Dickson’s winning essay “Interior Matters: Hunger and Secrecy in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’” is a subtle, finely nuanced essay which allows us to see this much-discussed story in a new light. It adopts a mode of enquiry in which psychoanalysis is not applied to Mansfield’s texts, rather the essay explores the implication of psychoanalysis within them. This yields a reading which is supremely alert to textual detail and which opens up new perspectives on this familiar story. The essay is innovative, beautifully written throughout and announces the arrival of a fresh and original critical voice’.

Polly Dickson is a Ph.D. student with the departments of German and French at the University of Cambridge (UK). Her dissertation focuses on mimesis and mimicry in the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Honoré de Balzac. She is currently a visiting research scholar at New York University. She will receive a prize of NZ$ 500 (£211), and her essay will appear in the annual book series Katherine Mansfield Studies (Volume 8), on Katherine Mansfield and Psychology, to be published in October 2016 by Edinburgh University Press (sent free to all members of the Society).