Winner of the Angharad Dodds John Essay Prize, 2025
We are pleased to announce the winner of the Essay Prize for 2025. From a strong field of high-quality essays on a variety of topics, the judges selected the essay titled ‘Welsh Historians and the Memory of the Mortimers in Sixteenth-Century Wales’, by Dr Dewi Alter. The essay discusses how the Mortimer family, the Earls of March, were commemorated by later historians, especially Humphrey Llwyd in his Cronica Walliae and David Powel in his Historie of Cambria now called Wales. The judges found that the essay met all the criteria for the prize and commented that ‘the essay is scholarly but also accessible, demonstrating rigour and originality in its research.’ The winner receives a prize of £500 and the essay will be published in the next issue of the Transactions.
We want to thank the family of Angharad Dodds John for endowing this prize, which will be offered again in 2026.
Dr Dewi Alter is Lecturer in Welsh in Ysgol y Gymraeg, Cardiff University, and a College Research Associate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His first book, Cof Diwylliannol yng Nghymru’r Cyfnod Modern Cynnar, will be published in May 2025. He is currently preparing an edition of Robert Owen’s essays about the journey of King Cadwaladr the Blessed, last king of Britain, to Rome, written in the 1580s. The essays were recently rediscovered in the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana. Dr Alter has held postdoctoral fellowships in the School of Celtic, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Department of Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth University.
The judges for the Angharad Dodds John Essay Prize 2025 were Prof. Helen Fulton and Prof. Sara Elin Roberts