Eleanor Fitzsimons wins the Keats-Shelley Essay Prize for 2013
9 Nov 2013

On Thursday evening, 7 November, in front of a distinguished audience that filled St. Martin’s Hall in St. Martin’s Crypt to capacity, the prestigious Keats-Shelley Essay prize for 2013 was awarded to Eleanor Fitzsimons for her essay ‘The Shelleys in Ireland: Passion masquerading as insight?’.

On presenting the prize to Ms. Fitzsimons, acclaimed novelist and chair of the judging panel Salley Vickers described her winning essay as, ‘a thoughtful, exciting account of political reform’, and spoke of how her own admiration for the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was tainted somewhat by his behaviour towards his first wife, Harriet.

The Keats-Shelley Essay Prize, established in 1998 by the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, actively champions and celebrates new voices and emerging writers. In her introduction, Salley Vickers described the essays submitted this year as, ‘rich and various, scholarly and for the most part pleasingly original’.

The winning essay by Eleanor Fitzsimons will be published in the next issue of the Keats-Shelley Review and ties into a wider project, a biography she is working on that examines Harriet Shelley’s fascinating, turbulent and tragic life. Further details of this biography, which is at an advanced stage of research, can be found here (link to book description).