Joint winners announced for the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2020
This year, our biennial award celebrates the work of two emerging scholars in the field of Shakespeare studies
We’re thrilled to announced this year’s winners for the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award 2020 – and yes, the keen-eyed among you will have noticed winners plural.
The Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award is awarded every two years to an early career scholar for a first book that has made a significant contribution to our understanding and appreciation of the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
The Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award is awarded every two years to an early career scholar who has produced a first book that makes a significant contribution to our understanding and appreciation of the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Our 2020 Award saw fifteen titles submitted by academic presses across the world, an exceptionally strong haul that reflects the continuing vitality of Shakespeare studies, and from that selection, a shortlist of four books was drawn last month.
This year, we’re absolutely delighted to announce that the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award is jointly-awarded to Oliver Morgan (University of Cambridge) for Turn-Taking in Shakespeare and Emma Whipday (Newcastle University) for Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies – a hearty Globe congratulations to you both!
As well as sharing the cash prize of £3,000, the winners will also share a platform for the prize-winners’ talks, that this year will be presented online this Autumn (further details to follow).
“Such was the calibre of all the submissions that we chose to shortlist four books, rather than three, this year. Such was the quality of the shortlist that the panel felt the prize of £3,000 should be split between Emma and Oliver.”
— Patrick Spottiswoode, Director, Globe Education
The panel for our 2020 Award was chaired by Patrick Spottiswoode (Director, Globe Education) and included Dr Will Tosh (Research Fellow and Lecturer, Shakespeare’s Globe) and four previous award-winners: Dr Gwilym Jones (Senior Lecturer in English, University of Westminster), Dr Abigail Rokison-Woodall (Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare and Theatre, University of Birmingham), Dr Simon Smith (Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, University of Birmingham) and Dr Gillian Woods (Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Theatre and Drama, Birkbeck University of London).
Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award 2020 winners
Oliver Morgan’s Turn-Taking in Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2019)
Emma Whipday’s Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
On Turn-Taking in Shakespeare, the judges said:
“Oliver Morgan’s Turn-Taking in Shakespeare provides a galvanising new way of interpreting Renaissance plays. The mechanisms of dialogue – the sequencing of speakers, their interruptions, pauses, and failures to respond – open out new insights into character, dramaturgy, social relationships, and ideological structures. While the focus is on Shakespeare, and what Morgan stylishly argues is his brilliance in dialogue, the implications stretch to Renaissance drama more broadly.”
On Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies, the judges said:
“Emma Whipday’s impressive Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies is a project of reclamation, in that she is seeking to bring to attention the overlooked genre of domestic tragedy, and expansion, in that she wants already established canonical texts to be brought into that classification. In her readings, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear reappear as domestic tragedies, and she gives them new potency and charge by her exposure of these plays’ deep engagement with the shibboleths and secrets of early modern domesticity.”
The runners-up for our 2020 Award were: Harriet Phillips (Queen Mary University London) for Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510-1613: Merry Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Lieke Stelling (Utrecht University) for Religious Conversion in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Thank you to all fifteen authors whose work we were privileged to discover this summer and a huge congratulations to this year’s winners.
