The Rex Warner Prize Winners 2026

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.

We congratulate the Rex Warner Prize 2026 winners, Trisha-Mae Capistrano (MSc Experimental Psychology, 2025) for her short story, ‘The People Who Own Themselves’, and Ivana Clapperton (BA English Language and Literature), for her poem, ‘I Do (And I Will)’.

The Rex Warner Literary Prizes 2026 was judged by Alice Baldock, Okinaga Junior Research Fellow in Japanese Studies, and Lewis Wynn, Lecturer in English. They had the pleasure of considering seventeen entries: seven prose works, six poems (or collections of poems), three translations, and one mixed prose and poetry work. There was a very high standard of submissions in every category (with some especially strong prose entries). The judges decided to split the award equally between two entries (at £75 each).

In making their choice, the judges looked for confident and complex handling of form and tone, and an interesting use of language more broadly. They were agreed in selecting the two winners, a short poem titled ‘I Do (And I Will),’ and a short story titled ‘The People Who Own Themselves.’ The judges enjoyed the poem’s deft management of diction and rhythm, as well as the arresting interplay between its images of natural and social life, which were both mysterious and affecting. They enjoyed equally the story’s subtle yet powerful staging of intergenerational trauma through the narrative lens of a series of diaristic accounts drawn from across the span of a single life. Both entries were particularly sensitive to the affordances of their chosen form, and were shaped artfully in relation to their subject matter.

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