Latest News

St Hugh’s presents Avril Bruten Award 2025 for creative writing

This year’s Avril Gilchrist Bruten Award for Creative Writing again revealed the range and invention of our students’ writing. Among the shortlisted entries were reflective pieces – for example about treating patients as a clinical medic, or spending time in post-Assad Damascus; witty and telling poetry capturing a spoken voice; writing that knits together the confessional and the academically curious (for example, how to impress a girl at the gladiatorial games in Rome); and fiction that’s both emotionally charged and very funny.

The Award draws entries from across the College – undergraduate and postgraduate, and students on many different courses. At a celebration event on 6 March, the shortlisted students read from their entries, and we also heard two poems by Avril Bruten. The judge this year was Hannah Lowe, whose brilliant collection of sonnets The Kids (2021) was Costa Book of the Year. Her work is direct, funny, yearning and often returns to the complexity of memory. Hannah was brought up in Ilford, just round the corner from Avril Bruten (though separated by a few decades!), and enjoyed talking to Avril’s nephew Mike and his wife Melissa, who came to support the event. Hannah also ran a very successful writing workshop with St Hugh’s students earlier in the day.

The winner of this year’s award is Sophie Harrison (third year Modern Languages), for her story ‘Gaslight’. It combines beautiful detail with the fantastical and threatening, and brilliantly evokes its setting in Lincoln. Congratulations to her, and well done to all St Hugh’s writers.

Professor Nicholas Perkins, who organised this year’s Award, commented, ‘The Avril Bruten Award is a great incentive for students across the College to share their writing, and get advice from a celebrated writer. This year’s entries once again showed how much creative work is going on here, and how coming together to celebrate it enhances our College community.’

When asked what inspired her to write her story, award winner, Sophie said, ‘‘Gaslight’ was inspired by the history and folklore of my hometown of Lincoln, particularly the legend of the Lincoln Imp – a grotesque perched inside the cathedral – and the city’s steampunk festival. The setting was influenced by a real shop, the Lincoln Imporium, which sells painted models of the imp. As an avid reader and (attempted) writer of Gothic, speculative fiction, I am drawn to the uncanny combination of new and old in steampunk aesthetics. In my narrative, I blend historic superstitions surrounding the imp with contemporary concerns. The imp becomes a kind of allegory for the fear that people, especially women, experience today. The story is titled ‘Gaslight’ for its Victorian resonances, but equally because it is about a woman who is gaslit when she dares to speak up. It also tries to gaslight the reader into thinking it is an old tale, when in fact it is an all too modern one.’