We are delighted to announce to the winner of the BCLA First Book Prize 2025, which honours an outstanding first monograph in the field of comparative literature. The inaugural award goes to Dr Cedric Van Dijck’s Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War (Edinburgh University Press).
The jury, which included Prof. Ziad Elmarsafy, Prof. Francesca Orsini, Dr Ian Ellison, Dr Jessica Sequeira, and Dr Joanna Rzepa, commended the book for offering a fascinating study that revisits how experimental forms of writing captured the unravelling of the mind due to World War One. Moving away from conventional accounts of modernism and shell shock, this highly original monograph pays attention to printed artefacts from numerous archives to offer new readings of a wide range of war experiences from canonical and less well-known authors from the UK and Europe, as well as writers in colonial contexts.
The jury would also like to recognise the runner-up: Dr Fusako Innami’sTouching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan (University of Michigan Press). The judges considered it an exciting book that examines literary and textual descriptions of vision and touch as acts of translation and mediation across the senses, particularly when vision and description substitute for touch. It is a theoretically sophisticated study that offers an insightful discussion of relationality through the skin and interactions of the body and language in the writings of Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Rieko.
The BCLA Executive Committee offer their warmest congratulations to Dr Van Dijck and Dr Innami!
