Book Awards. The Winners for 2026 (Santiago de Compostela)

ELL Category B

Stephen Turton
Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600–1930
published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.

In his highly original and engaging book Before the Word Was Queer, Stephen Turton expertly uncovers how the vocabulary referring to same-sex love and desire was recorded (or silenced) in English dictionaries from Robert Cawdrey’s (1604) A Table Alphabeticall to the first edition of the OED. Included in the purview are not just general dictionaries and ‘hard word’ dictionaries, but also more specialized ones (legal, medical, and dictionaries of cant and slang), alongside other documentary sources, including English diarist Anne Lister’s private erotic glossary, or the OED’s rich archives of drafts, quotation slips and letters. In elegant and witty prose, Turton navigates changing historical contexts and thematic foci such as the role played by lexicography in upholding the law, in construing same-sex intimacy as inherently un-English, or in silencing or ghosting erotic lexis (for instance pertaining to sexuality between women). Word lovers will appreciate Turton’s careful readings, as when he returns to the original 1894 letter by the 9th Marquess of Queensberry to propose a better transcription and interpretation of its use of queer, as modifier of liar rather than in its modern sense. Reference to contemporary controversies and crowd-sourced online lexicons connect the broad historical scope with the present day, and throughout, Turton shows deftness and maturity in coherently welding together perspectives from across historical lexicography, sociolinguistics, queer theory, intellectual history, and literary criticism. A treasure trove of unexpected words and word uses, this remarkable book rightly centres dictionary makers and dictionary users in the construction of same-sex identities.

ELL Category A

Daniela Landert
Methods in Historical Corpus Pragmatics. Epistemic Stance in Early Modern English published by Cambridge University Press in 2024

Daniela Landert’s book entitled Methods in Historical Corpus Pragmatics. Epistemic Stance in Early Modern English is a fascinating contribution to the field of historical corpus pragmatics. Focusing on epistemic stance in the Early Modern period—that is, expressions that convey the degree of certainty and reliability of information—the book is both theoretically strong and methodologically innovative. The author offers a compelling reconceptualization of the concept of “certainty” but also makes an important distinction between explicit and implied stance marking. She walks us through the challenges involved in combining into a single corpus four Early Modern English corpora compiled at different times, with various formats and for different purposes. Building on this unified corpus, Landert introduces an original approach that combines established quantitative methods with qualitative analyses of passages containing a high density of stance markers, where pragmatic features frequently cluster. This mixed-methods approach enables her to identify expressions undetected in earlier research. Landert demonstrates why the targeted analysis of text passages with a high likelihood of including a given pragmatic function in specific genres facilitates the retrieval of a more diverse range of stance markers while allowing for a richer contextual investigation of their functions. An additional strength of the method is its scalability, making it applicable to larger datasets and other pragmatic phenomena. Through a series of in-depth case studies, the book offers a captivating account of how (un)certainty was communicated in the past in relation to generic as well as socio-cultural and biographical factors.

LIT Category B

Angela Suárez Rodríguez
Emotional Transitions in Contemporary Afrodiasporic Women’s Writing: Defying the Ontology of the Stranger
published by Routledge in 2024

Ángela Suárez-Rodríguez’s study is an exceptional and original contribution to postcolonial studies. It analyses how four contemporary Afrodiasporic novels of female authorship challenge traditional conceptions of the figure of the stranger. Her study employs affect theory and a feminist perspective to explore feelings of shame, hope and nostalgia in the context of migration to the West, revealing a plurality of conditions of estrangement that depend on the specific politics of location and identity from which they emerge. Written in a clear, precise and accessible style, Suárez-Rodríguez’s work exemplifies both the standards of excellence required in academic research and the critical depth necessary to understand emotional transitions and contemporary racial identity. It will be of significant interest to scholars in the fields of Postcolonial Studies, African Diaspora Studies and Black Women’s Literature.

LIT Category A

Emily Cuming
Maritime Relations: Life, Labour and Literature at the Water’s Edge, 1850–1914
published by Cambridge University Press in 2025

Emily Cuming’s book provides a compelling ‘literary history from below’ of London’s ‘maritime cityscape’ and its ‘working waterscape’ across the late nineteenth century and modernity. It offers ‘both a distant and proximate view of […] “maritime relations”, in the dual sense of social relations shaped by the sea (including those of family and broader kin) and the influence of watery worlds on the development of literature and writing in the period’. It studies these ‘terraqueous relations’ through attention to seafarers’ accounts, literary (re)imaginings, archival sources, diverse cultural histories, and journalistic and popular writing. This affords trenchantly original perspectives on literary figuring of the sea within British (and broader) cultural imaginaries, but also, crucially, on interdiscursive understandings of kinship, home, labour, authorship, city and periphery. Among the texts closely studied are working-class autobiographies, logbooks and sea diaries, literary and popular fictions, and ‘insurgent narrative’ by the figure of the sailor’s daughter. Maritime Relations thereby bears prismatic relevance for research within literary history, nineteenth-century studies, modernism, genre studies, comparative literature, life writing, gender theory and the blue humanities – and for interrelations between these fields. It distinguishes itself through the seamlessness with which it draws together methodologies and perspectives from all of those areas and the textured pertinence it carries for all of them. It is impressive too in the scholarly and stylish verve with which it demonstrates what scholarship within English literary studies can productively extend to in terms of texts and genres that can be read in close – and exhilarating – correspondence.

CULT Category B

Nicoletta Asciuto
Brilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry
published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2025

Brilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry is an outstanding and highly original contribution to Cultural and Area Studies in English. Although its title foregrounds modernist poetry, the volume moves well beyond literary analysis by examining light as a cultural, technological, aesthetic and social force in the early twentieth century. Moreover, despite its strong interpretative dimension, the book is deeply grounded in historical research. Asciuto consistently examines the cultural transformations produced by electrification, the everyday practices of light, the technologies of illumination, and their social meanings. This historical depth gives the volume a solidity that fully supports its interdisciplinary argument. 

The book combines refined textual analysis with cultural history, visual culture, media history and the history of technology. Particularly impressive is its attention to overlooked women writers and artists and to the ways in which modernist aesthetics intersect with gender, race, urban modernity and material culture. 

For its originality, interdisciplinary sophistication and elegant argumentation, the committee considers the volume a fully deserving winner of the ESSE Book Award.

CULT Category A

Paul Crosthwaite
Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis
published by Oxford University Press in 2025

Paul Crosthwaite’s Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis, published by Oxford University Press, is an outstanding and genuinely interdisciplinary monograph. The book offers a powerful account of the relations between American literature, financial speculation, temporality and crisis in the first half of the twentieth century. It combines literary analysis with economic history, cultural history, the sociology of finance, visual culture, Black studies and theories of temporality, producing a richly contextualised and methodologically ambitious study. 

Its central argument, that economic speculation generated distinctive temporal modes that shaped literary, cultural and visual culture in the United States, is original, persuasive and consistently developed. The volume is especially impressive in the way it links the Great Crash of 1929, the speculative culture that preceded it and the political and racial formations that followed it. Its readings of canonical and less frequently discussed authors are supported by extensive primary and secondary research and by a sophisticated understanding of North American capitalism as both an economic system and a cultural imagination. 

The book is written in exceptionally clear academic prose and represents a major contribution to Cultural and Area Studies in English. For these reasons, it fully deserves the ESSE Book Award.