Humanities Writing Competition
This competition is now closed. Please come back to this page in Autumn 2025 for the 2025-26 competition.
2024-25 Competition
This is an opportunity for students to research and write beyond the curriculum, using one or more of five selected objects from the Lawrence Room museum objects, as their focus. Essays or creative responses (such as dramatic monologues, short stories or poems) are equally welcome.
The objects in the Lawrence Room that were chosen as starting points for this year’s competition were:
- two small amulets from ancient Egypt, part of the collection donated by Gwendolen Crewdson, representing the divinities Bes and Bastet, both protectors of women, children and childbirth;
- a terracotta ‘Tanagra’ figurine from Boeotia, Greece, dating from the fourth century BC, depicting a woman holding a fan;
- a devotional statue of a Tudigong, a neighbourhood-protecting god, from late nineteenth or early twentieth century south-east China;
- a cinerary urn from the Roman and early medieval cemetery at Girton College, dating from the late fifth or sixth century CE.
Girton is grateful to Cambridge University Press and The C. Anne Wilson Fund for kind sponsorship of the competition.
General Feedback
A great deal of good and interesting work was submitted, with every object well represented among the entries. In general feedback, we must reiterate that professional presentation is vital: some promising entries were let down by issues such as imprecise or absent referencing (in factual essays), careless English, or infringement of the word limit. Some entries could not be considered because they were submitted late, incomplete, or with incorrectly filled-in cover sheets. We must also remind schools of the rule that no more than three entries per school may be submitted. The condition that entries must be the student’s own work means that AI must not be used, and entries are checked for use of AI.
We do not provide detailed feedback on individual essays other than those of the winners, but we send thanks to all the competitors for taking part. All entrants have been awarded a certificate in recognition of their participation.
The winners of the 2024-25 competition were invited to Girton College on Thursday 8 May for an afternoon of tours, tea and cake, and receiving their prizes from Dr Elisabeth Kendall (Mistress) and Dr Caroline Brett (Director of Studies in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic Studies).
2024-25 Winners
'Exploring the differences in gender roles and relationship dynamics of Bes, Tudigong and their female counterparts’
This brilliantly original essay ingeniously connected two artefacts from very different times and places to illustrate the contrasting place of gender in the worldviews of ancient Egyptian religion and Chinese Confucian philosophy. Widely researched and very maturely and professionally written.
‘Ode on a Cinerary Urn’
This poem was an exceptionally mature, bold and ambitious piece which impressively connected historical and literary knowledge. It referred to Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ in subject-matter and formal construction while using highly individual, dense, knotty metaphors and phrasing: a beautiful commemoration of the object.
N Minhas - ‘Dual Tanagramania’
Narayan’s essay counterpointed a study of the original purpose of Tanagra figurines with their rediscovery in Victorian times, with well chosen literary and artistic examples illustrating how and why they spoke to that moment in English and American history. Wide-ranging research was combined with lively presentation.
L Wilmouth - ‘The Tactile Power of the Small: An Analysis of Three Sacred Objects’
This essay connected the Egyptian amulets and the Tudigong figurine by focusing on the appeal of small intimate ritual objects compared to large imposing ones – the subversive power of the hidden and the intimacy of touch. The author showed impressive knowledge in drawing on a wide range of comparative examples from different religions and historical periods.
G Wardlaw - 'Buried Voices'
This entry was a beautifully achieved poem on the cinerary urn, one of two on the winning roster. One judge wrote that it conveys ‘a sense of somebody who reads poetry and knows the dynamics of line and stanza’, and: ‘This poem isn’t wearing research on its sleeve, but is an act of research in itself’.
F Harrison - 'On Seeing the Cinerary Urn in the Lawrence Room'
Flora’s essay was a reflection on the mixed funerary practices of the Girton cemetery in the light of her own experience of her grandfather’s funeral and handling the container of his ashes. It melded scholarship and autobiography in a very accomplished and moving way.