The P G Wodehouse Society (UK) Essay Prize 2022

Happiness, as solid thinkers have often pointed out, comes from giving pleasure to others.

P G Wodehouse

We are delighted to announce the winners of the Society’s inaugural Essay Prize.

The winner in the adult category is Fergus Butler-Gallie with his entry The Hour Breeds Thought - Night Time In The Stories Of P. G. Wodehouse. The junior competition was won by Anna Sanchez O’Brien with The Reasons Why Stories Of Jeeves And Wooster Should Be Introduced To Young Adult Audiences. The standard and quantity of submissions was strong and these winners were chosen after much thought and debate from an excellent short-list selected by members of an independent judging panel.

Fergus Butler-Gallie’s entry is not just about Wodehouse’s use of night as a plotting device. His thesis it that ‘Wodehousian night has a character - is a character - all of its own’. Mr Butler-Gallie, who lives in Kent, England describes himself as: ‘a clergyman, teacher, and writer’. He said: “I came to Wodehouse as a teenager, finding an ageing copy in a bookcase at home of ‘Aunts aren’t Gentleman’ and was absolutely enchanted by him.”

Anna Sanchez O’Brien’s entry, as the title suggests, argues the case for the Jeeves and Wooster stories as reading for young adults. Anna is 13 years old and lives in Essex. She says that she loves reading, drawing and singing. She first read Wodehouse when she was 11 and “I haven’t looked back since”.

The winners will be presented with their prizes of £1,000 for the adult competition winner and £250 for the junior winner, at the Society’s next London meeting at the Savile Club on Monday 6 February 2023. We encourage members to attend.

The judges decided that two entries deserved ‘honourable mentions’. In Wodehouse Adapting Wodehouse: A Damsel in Distress Across Media, Ashley Polasek showed how Wodehouse adapted the same plot for the novel, the stage and film to demonstrate that the loss of the author’s voice in the novel did not detract from the success of the story in the other media. Dorothy McDowell, in The Last of The Pelicans: Galahad Threepwood as Gay Icon, combined a sensitive celebration of one of Wodehouse’s greatest characters with a brilliant exploration of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century social history.

The winning essay will be published in the March edition of Wooster Sauce. We plan to work with a publisher to publish the two winners and the two honourable mentions in book form later in the new year.

Professor Sophie Ratcliffe said: "It was a huge pleasure to chair the inaugural Wodehouse Essay Prize. The standard was extremely high, making our job as a panel delightfully difficult. All our shortlisted writers shed light on both the world of Wodehouse and the world at large. Our three final selected essays did this wonderfully - helping us to think differently about what it means to move between media, imagining hypothetical hidden lives and social histories - and, with our winning entry - illuminating the idea of the fictional night, not just as a backdrop, but as a character with a life of its own".

Elliott Milstein said of the junior entries: “All seven deserve high praise, but ‘The Reasons Why Stories of Jeeves and Wooster should be introduced to Young Adult Audiences’ clearly rang the bell and took the coconut!”

The other three shortlisted entries were: P.G. Wodehouse, Modernist? by Stewart Ferris; Concealed Art: high Modernism and low art in an early short story by Fintan O’Higgins; and Jeeves, Wooster and the Impending Doom by Hugo Sousa Simões.

We were delighted with the response to our first Essay Prize. 49 entries were received for the adult competition and seven for the junior. The competition was, as we had hoped, truly international, with entries from all over the world including entrants that we know of from India, Switzerland, Norway, Greece, Australia, Portugal, Belgium, South Africa and the USA. It was especially gratifying to see so many young people with an enthusiasm and extensive knowledge of Wodehouse’s writing.

All the entries were anonymised before they were sent to the judges. Elliott Milstein and Sophie Ratcliffe drew up a shortlist of six entries in the adult competition; all the junior entries were read by all the judges. The judges met in Oxford in the second half of November to make their decisions, with Elliott Milstein flying in from the USA to join the discussion and Stephen Fry joining by video link.

We are enormously grateful to all who took the time and trouble to enter our competition. Our intention was to encourage scholarly analysis of Wodehouse’s writing and it was clear that considerable effort and scholarship lay behind the entries, with references and citations from across the range of Wodehouse’s work and the wider literary world. There was a pervasive sense of fun, and we sincerely hope that whilst we have sadly had to disappoint so many, all who entered enjoyed putting their entry together and can stand proud in the knowledge that standards were so high.

We must also, of course, say a huge thank you to our distinguished panel of judges, without whom there would be no competition. Above all, we should like to thank Professor Sophie Ratcliffe who helped shape this competition.

Tim Andrew
Chairman

Panel of Judges

Paula Byrne, novelist and bestselling biographer
Stephen Fry, actor, broadcaster, director and writer.
Patrick Kidd, writer and journalist, editor, Times Diary column.
Elliott Milstein, authority on Wodehouse and senior figure in the American P G Wodehouse Society.
Sophie Ratcliffe (in the chair), writer, critic, academic, and editor of P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters.
Cat White, writer, actor, filmmaker and gender advisor to the UN.