17/10/2026
Join us in congratulating two St Catharine’s Fellows who have received prestigious awards for their writing in recent days!
📚 On 15 October, Dr Hester Lees-Jeffries (2006) received the British Academy’s oldest prize, the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, which is awarded each year for an historical or critical book by a woman, on any subject connected with literature. She won for ‘Textile Shakespeare’ (Oxford University Press, 2025), a new major work on Shakespeare that reveals the importance of textile culture to the early modern world that was the subject of her Henn Lecture at Catz in 2025 (see caths.cam.ac.uk/textile-shakespeare). She has also resumed her Slow Shakespeare project, examining each passage from Henry IV Part 1 in turn, which you can follow along with at english.cam.ac.uk/research/slow-shakespeare/category/slow-shakespeare/prodigal-prince/
📚 On 11 October, Prof. Philippe Sands KC HonFBA (Fellow Commoner 1984–86; Research Fellow 1986–88; Honorary Fellow 2026) was presented with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Since 1950, the prize has honoured individuals for their contributions to peace, humanity and understanding between peoples. The jury praised “the narrative brilliance and historical depth” of his work. Read more: https://www.friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de/en/alle-preistraeger-seit-1950/2020-2029/philippe-sands
Photos courtesy of the British Academy and Tobias Bohm.
