https://essenglish.org/book-awards-shortlists/ 

ESSE Book Awards 2026

Winners of the 2024 Book Awards | Previous Winners

For books first published in 2024 and 2025 (date on imprint page of published book)

• Category A is open for all books

• Category B is for the first book only

ESSE Book Awards Ceremony

Monday 31 August 2026 in Santiago de Compostela
as part of the ESSE-18 conference opening (12.30 p.m.)

Shortlists

In alphabetical order

1. English Language and Linguistics

Category A (Open)

• Axel Bohmann. English across Borders. A Reflexive Approach to Anglophone Migrants’ Repertoires. John Benjamins, 2025. 

• Claudia Claridge, Ewa Jonsson, and Merja Kytö. Intensifiers in Late Modern English: A Sociopragmatic Approach to Courtroom Discourse. Cambridge University Press, 2024. 

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

• Vanessa Leonardi and Patrizia Giampieri. Legal English through the Ages: A Corpus-Based Investigation of Change and Continuity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. 

• Giuseppina Scotto di Carlo. A Critical Discourse Analysis of Violence against Women. From D.A.R.V.O. to Institutional Courage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.

Category B (First book)

• Anika Gerfer. Jamaican Creole in Global Reggae and Dancehall Performances: Language Use, Perceptions, Attitudes. Edinburgh University Press, 2025.

• Elen Le Foll. Textbook English: A Multi-Dimensional Approach. John Benjamins, 2024.

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

2. Literatures in the English language

Category A (Open)

• Colombino, Laura. Kazuo Ishiguro and Ethics. Routledge, 2025.

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

• Effe, Alexandra. A History of Autofiction: Cognitive and Cultural Work from 18th-Century England to Contemporary Global Anglophone Literatures. Bloomsbury, 2025.

• Guttzeit, Gero. In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Narratives of Invisibility Since the Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.

• Steiner, Enit K. Contesting Cosmopolitan Moments in the Long Eighteenth Century. Edinburgh University Press, 2025.

Category B (First book)

• Julia Ditter. Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination. Bloomsbury, 2025.

• Cristina Salcedo González. The Persephone Myth in Young Adult Fiction. From Girl to Woman. Bloomsbury, 2025.

• Matthew Scully. Democratic Anarchy: Aesthetics and Political Resistance in U.S. Literature. Fordham University Press, 2024.

• Ángela Suárez-Rodríguez. Emotional Transitions in Contemporary Afrodiasporic Women’s Writing: Defying the Ontology of the Stranger. Routledge, 2024.

• Michelle Vaziri Leila. The Theatre of Anxiety: Border Crossings in 21st-Century British Theatre. De Gruyter, 2024.

3. Cultural and Area Studies in English

Category A (Open)

• Paul Crosthwaite. Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis. Oxford University Press, 2025.

• Ágnes Zsófia Kovács. The Memory of Architecture in Edith Wharton’s Travel Writings. Routledge, 2024.

• Pavan Kumar Malreddy. Insurgent Cultures: World Literatures and Violence from the Global South. Cambridge University Press, 2025.

• Michaël Roy. Young Abolitionists: Children of the Antislavery Movement. University of Georgia Press, 2024.

Category B (First book)

• Nicoletta Asciuto. Brilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025.

• Julia Echeverría. Epidemic Cinema: The Rise of a Genre. Routledge, 2024.

• Gabriela Minden. Modernism after the Ballets Russes: Movement in the British Theatre. Oxford University Press, 2025.

• Fernando Pérez-García. Reading Wayde Compton: Geohistorical (Re)Constructions of Black Vancouver. Routledge, 2025.

• Astrid Schwegler-Castañer. Culinary Discourses in Asian-Australian Writing: Masticating Multiculturalism. Brill, 2025.