Student wins prestigious literary prize
An Oxford student has won a prestigious national competition to have her book published. Heather McRobie, a History and Politics finalist at Keble, was announced as winner of the Hélène du Coudray Undergraduate Novel Writing Prize during the Lady Margaret Hall Literary Festival on April 28th. McRobie will now have her novel, Psalm 119, published by Maia Press in Spring 2008.
The prize was set up to find the best novel written by an undergraduate student aged under 25 at a UK university and required applicants to submit a whole novel within the year 2006. McRobie said, “The novel is about the lives of three people in the first six years of this century, and is set in Oxford, Geneva, Sarajevo and Israel/ Palestine. “I wrote it one summer in Israel when I didn’t have anything else to do, so it wasn’t too time-consuming.
I was very, very shocked to win and gave a really awful, nervous acceptance speech.” A total of 25 students from across the country entered the competition judged by contemporary writers, Fay Weldon and Tobias Hill. Both were extremely impressed with McRobie’s work. Hill said, “I began reading Psalm 119 late one night, and my first realisation, as I read, was that I was no longer tired: my second was that I would not be going to bed until the novel was ready to let me go.
Weldon also praised McRobie’s work, saying, “An inborn literary skill, a deftness of language, a roving and enquiring mind, the literal and the metaphorical working in tandem - equally at home with the known and the so far unknown - and funny with it. If she keeps it up she’ll take her place amongst the best in the land."
McRobie said, “I do want to be a writer but I know it’s very competitive, so I’m going to Montreal next year to study Islamic & Jewish studies, then to American lawschool. I’m working on a second novel, but I’m not sure it’ll ever see the light of day.
10th May 2007