The JLS/BSLS Early career Essay Prize is award yearly to the best essay by a PGR or ECR in the field of literature and science.
The prize is judged jointly by representative of the Journal of Literature and Science and the BSLS. The winning essay is published in the JLS, and the winner receives a prize of £100.
You can find details of how to submit an entry for the 2026 prize here.
Previous Winners:
2025: Sina Schuhmaier, “Subject Formation in the Early Black Atlantic: Disease Narratives of the Middle Passage”
2024: Max Chapnick, “Characters as Fields in Bleak House”
2023: Louise Benson James, ‘“What an autopsy I’ll make, with everything all which ways in my bowels!”: the intracorporeal landscapes of Djuna Barnes’
2022: No Award
2021: No Award
2020: Jim Scown, “World-ecology ‘among the ooze’: Our Mutual Friend and the Chemistry of Sewage, Soils, and Circulation”
2019: Lara Choksey, “Peripheral Adaptation: Living with Climate Change in Doris Lessing’s The Making of the Representative for Planet 8.”
2018: Kimberley Dimitriadis, “Telescopes in the Drawing Room: Geometry and Astronomy in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.”
2017: No Award
2016: Rachel Murray, ‘Vermicular Origins: The Creative Evolution of Samuel Beckett’s Worm’
2015: Maria Avxentevskaya, ‘The Spiritual Optics of Narrative: John Wilkins’s popularization of Copernicanism’
2014: Emilie Taylor-Pirie, ‘(Re)constructing the Knights of Science: Parasitologists and their Literary Imaginations’
2013: Rachel Crossland, ‘”Multitudinous and Minute”: Early Twentieth-Century Scientific, Literary and Psychological Representations of the Mass’
Honourable Mention: Josie Gill, ‘Science and Fiction in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth‘
