2009 Wigram Allen Essay Competition
On Monday 31 August, four brave students attempted to fill the Wigram Allen brief of constructing an essay on any topic and presenting it to an audience of their fellow students. Daniel Loudon's essay on originality or lack thereof in the current day was followed by Henry Stewart's passionate appeal to his peers to move outside of the Trinity utopia, lest we become too complacently forgetful of the more discriminatory world outside of our campus. Joshua Crowther argued elegantly for the need to become global citizens, while Matthew Chalk delivered a moving and lyrical meditation on language, thought, poetry and the religion of metaphor.
The judges - visiting scholar Professor Gary Stager, visiting Fellow Dr Katherine Firth, and resident tutor in German, Paul Broussard - took over 40 minutes in their deliberations before the 'puff of white smoke', as Prof. Stager called it, could be released from the SCR, with Matthew being declared the winner. In her summation, Dr Firth mentioned not only the originality and poetic beauty of Mathew's piece, but also its 'charming world-weariness'.
Matthew will be presented with the winner's cheque on September 9 by the President of the Dialectic Society, Trinity's Warden Andrew McGowan. Congratulations to current Dialectic secretary Ben Murphy for encouraging four such diverse and thought-provoking pieces, and also to last year's Secretary Eamon Byrne, who resurrected the competition after a fallow period. The Wigram Allen bell, recently re-presented back to the college after its 37-year disappearance, rung the close to a wonderfully-stimulating evening.