This year’s winner is Grace MacDougall. Grace graduated from Edinburgh this summer with a first class honours MA in English and Scottish Literature. This completed a very distinguished student career: Grace came top of the class in both first and second year in Scottish Literature (where she read Rob Roy and The Bride of Lammermoor on the curriculum), before spending her third year at George Washington University in Washington DC. Her studies in her senior honours year included the modules ‘Strangers to Ourselves: Post-war and Contemporary Writing’ where she read Muriel Spark and Jackie Kay, and ‘Modernism, Myth and Romance 1880–1940’ where she particularly enjoyed studying Hugh MacDiarmid and Neil Gunn. Her seniors honours dissertation brought together topics she’d studied at George Washington and at Edinburgh in a comparison of MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. This dissertation was awarded a first-class mark, as was all her other work in her final year, and it is for this achievement that we are delighted to present Grace with the Walter Scott Medal for 2017.
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