Awards
SFU English celebrates its 2022 undergraduate award winners
SFU English congratulates its undergraduate students for their outstanding work this year.
Nimrit Basra is the winner of the Dr. M. Sheila O'Connell Undergraduate Prize in Children's Literature. She won the award for her trenchant, informed, and beautifully written critique entitled, "When You Reach My Socioeconomic Status: Critiquing Capitalism in Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me."
Hannah Big Canoe was awarded the Roy Miki Award in Creative Writing. She has distinguished herself in multiple genres of creative writing. While considering herself primarily a prose writer, her poetry written for English 472 also reveals striking ability in exploring nuanced and mature emotional content in engaging and spirited forms.
Sophia Dobischok won the Shenul Dhalla Undergraduate Award in English, which recognizes an outstanding student in SFU's Department of English. Dobischok's creativity, willingness to bridge traditionally distinct disciplines, strong work ethic, and exceptional academic performance make her an ideal recipient of this award.
Ethan Gibson received three awards:
- The Paul Delany Graduation Award in English, given to the student with the highest CGPA upon the completion of an English major
- The Philippa Polson Memorial Prize in English, awarded to the best English honours essay completed during the previous three terms
- The Tom Grieve English Honours Program Award, given to the student who has demonstrated past and present achievement and/or future promise as it pertains to the field of English
Gibson's honour's thesis, "W. G. Sebald, Belated Modernist: Toward a Minor Ethics of Reading," is a profoundly impressive achievement, and it announces him as a young academic with immense scholarly potential.
Angela Wachowich won the Jane Austen Society Prize for her essay, "Romantic Friendships: Eminent Women and the Ladies of Llangollen." Her essay offers a brilliant analysis of social relationships between Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsoby, the “Ladies of Llangollen,” and a set of lesser known women of the period. This kind of detailed social history provides context for better understanding the circumstances of Jane Austen’s adult life, as she too lived for many years in a household with other unmarried women, in retirement, in the country.
Isabella Wang is the winner of the Capi Blanchet Annual Scholarship in Fiction. Wang's poetry and prose writing is light years ahead of her 21 turns around the sun. She writes with a sensitivity and seriousness that is difficult to account for, and manages to dream up and meet intellectual challenges as a writer that seasoned scholars would approach with hesitation.