The Rex Warner Prize Winners 2025

Each year, Wadham College students are invited to submit an original short story; an original poem or poems; or a prose or verse translation from any ancient or modern language into English for this annual prize.

The 2025 Rex Warner Prize was judged by Alice Baldock, Okinaga Junior Research Fellow in Japanese Studies, and Stephen Heyworth, Professor of Latin, Bowra Fellow and Tutor in Classics. They had the pleasure of considering 17 entries: six poems or collections of poems, five translations, and six short stories. There was a high standard of submissions but this year, the judges agreed that the translation entries were all particularly strong. They decided to award 1st and 2nd place prizes of £100 and £50 respectively. In making their judgement, they looked for interesting, confident, and stimulating use of form and language, as well as originality or insight in choice of subject matter.

The judges concurred in selecting the first-prize winner, ‘Identitti’, a translation by Aaron Shankar (Modern Languages, 2019) of a high-quality German short story, setting against one another deaths of the focal character's mother and Her Majesty the Queen, and the perceived cancelling of Agatha Christie: they found this thematically and psychologically rich, translated with panache, maintaining the pace and intelligibility of the original, but with some apt and funny additions.

Alice and Stephen agreed also that the short story ‘A Song of Home’ by visiting student, Christyn Refuerzo, deserved second place. This story, beginning with three generations of women in the same room, encapsulated a wonderful transition from domestic realism to fantasy.

Many congratulations to the winners. The judges express their appreciation to every applicant: they found pleasure in their originality, the range of ideas, and the variety of forms.