The Kaufman Prize for Humanities
Year 13 students, Kaivalya and Kaloyan, reflect on the recent Humanities competition they organised with the help of Mrs Berry and Mrs Fletcher.
"Miranda Kaufman, famous for ‘Black Tudors’, has recently published a new book called ‘Heiresses’, which focuses on the stories of women who benefited from the Caribbean Slave Trade. In anticipation of her latest release, we asked whether we could run a competition in collaboration with her and award signed copies to our top winners. Thankfully, despite our audacious request, she agreed to provide copies for the competition and help us judge and organise it.
We ran the competition a few months ago, and we received far more entries than we had anticipated - thank you to everyone who submitted an entry. Even if you weren’t shortlisted, we read every submission and are very grateful that you took the time and effort to put it together. We hope that this will inspire you all to continue writing essays, poems, and stories in the future, especially without the restrictions of our deadlines!
Having mentioned the shortlist, we want to congratulate everyone who made it onto the shortlist. Please remember that, if your entry was shortlisted, we believe that it demonstrated a particular level of adroitness and craft that deserves plenty of merit, even if it didn’t make the top four. You can read all shortlisted entries in Issue 10 of the Humanities Magazine, which will be published soon.
Our winners are: Sam (Year 8), Aeshan (Year 9), Keynes (Year 9), and Vishahan (Year 8). Congratulations to them all! They will each receive a signed copy of ‘Heiresses’, and Sam - as our first-place winner - will receive a £20 voucher.
We would also like to thank everyone involved in making this competition happen, particularly given how unlikely it may have seemed when we first had the idea of running it in September. We would like to thank Miranda Kaufman for agreeing to provide prizes, for allowing us to use her name for the competition and for helping us record a video advertising the competition. We could not have done this without Mrs Berry’s and Mrs Fletcher’s indispensable help with the admin side of the competition, and selecting the winners - thank you!
Finally, we want to urge everyone, whether you wrote for this competition or not, to consider getting involved with similar opportunities in the future, which - and perhaps those involved in the competition could back us up on this - you will certainly get a lot out of. Even if you don't want to write for competitions, we would still encourage you to pursue writing, whether creative or academic, and we hope that this experience will have inspired you in some way."
