We are pleased to announce the winners for our 2025 awards and bursaries, which will be presented at the Embassy of Ireland on 22nd May. BAIS would like to acknowledge the valuable support of the Embassy of Ireland, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Cambridge University Press and the Irish Studies Review.

Book Prize

The 2025 Book Prize winner is Amanda Hall’s Strained Peace: Northern Ireland from Good Friday to Brexit  (Liverpool University Press). Hall is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Reading, with an interest in questions of the quality of peace established after negotiated settlements and the degree to which violence and its threat continue to shape that peace long after ceasefires, especially in deeply-divided societies. Strained Peace, her first monograph, examines the function – and dysfunction – of peace in Northern Ireland after 1998 to explain why its endurance cannot be taken for granted. This book explores how the condition of ‘strained peace’ developed between Good Friday and Brexit, addressing variations in the quality of peace in the insecurity of official structures at Stormont, the shifting role of community groups and the third sector, and the adaptation of culture as a “culture war” replaced physical violence on the streets.

Highly commended is Brian Griffin’s Crime and the Criminal Classes in Ireland, 1870-1920 (Cork University Press). Griffin has taught history at a number of universities in Ireland, the USA and Britain since the early 1980s. His research specialism is the social history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, with a particular focus on policing, crime and sport (especially cycling). Crime and the Criminal Classes in Ireland is the first publication to provide an in-depth discussion of crime in Ireland from 1870 to 1920. It looks afresh at the topic of crime in the 1870-1920 period, examining agrarian offences as one part of a more general study of lawbreaking by ‘ordinary’ Irish people and those whom the police categorised as Ireland’s ‘criminal classes’.

Essay Prize

The winner of the 2025 Postgraduate Essay Prize is Mikelyn Rochford of the University of York, for her essay ‘I took the left turn for eternity’: Otherworlds, Afterlives, and Discursive Storytelling Traditions in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré ne Cille / Graveyard Clay. Rochford’s essay examines these writers’ use of literary otherworlds drawn from earlier Irish storytelling traditions, and explores how their work challenge the ways in which narrative theory has conceived of afterlife stories as unnatural, oppositional, or dependent on a privileged realist norm, repurposing these modes to grapple with modern problems and themes.

The highly commended essay for 2025 is by Paddy Brennan of the University of Liverpool, titled ‘The Truly Gaelic Famine’: Food as a Symbol of Chauvinism and Internationalism in Irish Culture and Literature. Brennan’s essay examines how Frank McCourt and Colm Tóibín, amongst other Irish authors, articulate a vision of Ireland through food (or the lack thereof) and how these depictions variously compound or subvert pervasive myths concerning Irish cuisine.

Bursary Prizes

Each year BAIS distributes up to £4,000 in Bursaries to assist research students working on an Irish topic and registered with British institutions of higher education by financing expenses such as travel, accommodation, and costs incurred in consulting archives or conducting interviews. Our 2025 recipients and their research projects are:

Alice Reffin (University of Oxford), ‘”The Bond of Holy Paint”: Exploring the Role of Art in Commemorating Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising’

Ciara O’Neill (Edgehill University), ‘Looking back to look forward; examining the forgotten and misrepresented women’s voices of the Irish ‘Troubles’ in Belfast’

Niamh MacGloin (University of York), ‘Language and the Anxiety of Belonging in London-Irish Literature’

Paddy Brennan (University of Liverpool), ‘Food Consumption and Self-Starvation in Irish Fiction from Edna O’Brien to Sally Rooney’

Sophie O’Grady (King’s College London), ‘A Conscience Worth the Name: Culminations of Violence in Ireland’s Censored Literature, 1945-1971’