Byron Journal Essay Prize 2025

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2025 Byron Journal Essay Prize:

The first prize was awarded to Emma Marie Duke for her essay ‘Jane Austen’s Byron: The Real and Counterfactual Manuscripts of “Napoleon’s Farewell”’. The panel commended the essay’s resourceful exploration of the counterfactual in Byron’s and Austen’s work, highlighting the importance of this topic in wartime and in relation to the public characters of Napoleon and Byron, showing insight and fine attention to comparative and contextual detail. The essay will be published in the second issue of this year.

The runner-up prize was awarded to Alice Capstick for her essay ‘First Murderer and First Victim: A Literary Darwinist Study of Cain, A Mystery‘. The panel commended the essay’s insightful perspective on one of Byron’s most challenging works and its protagonist provided by the methodological approaches of bio-cultural studies, evolutionary psychology and literary Darwinism, including the concept of opportunities for learning through ‘cognitive play’, which invites us to rethink complex behaviour and morally ambiguous characters.

Congratulations to Emma and Alice on their thought-provoking and engaging work! The panel would also like to give an honourable mention to Simon Banks for his essay ‘Opera and Revolution – Byron’s European Legacy’ and to Leon Wang for his essay ‘From Lamenting Greece to Lamenting China – Translating Byron in the Age of Nationalism‘.

Overall, the panel was impressed by the imaginative variety of Byron-related topics. We thank all participants for submitting their work for the Essay Prize.