English student wins Copland Prize and Award for Excellence in English Studies

Ava McLean was one of the students honoured at spring convocation in June with a major award. Graduating with high honours in English, she won the Copland Prize, awarded annually to the most distinguished graduate in the humanities. She also won the top 2023 award for students in the department of English, the Award for Excellence in English Studies.

During her undergraduate studies, Ava developed a keen interest in the social- and class-related contexts of 20^th century British literature. One faculty member described Ava as “a natural scholar: keen, disciplined and motivated by genuine intellectual curiosity and an absorbing interest in literary study.” She has received numerous departmental awards, including the Hannon Scholarship, the Hannon Travel Scholarship, and the Reginald J.G. Bateman Memorial Scholarship.

In 2020, Ava published an article in the USask Undergraduate Research Journal resulting from an independent research project based on a series of twenty-nine interviews with Professor Emeritus Henry Woolf about the life and works of his friend and collaborator Harold Pinter. Her scholarship has been described as “not only original, incisive, and impressive as a research project devised by an undergraduate student, but quite ground-breaking in its own right."

As Vice-President and then President of the English Undergraduate Society, Ava’s aim was to identify and implement online activities and events to keep student members connected during the pandemic. As an active participant on the English Undergraduate Committee, she provided welcome advice from the student perspective.

This fall, Ava will pursue a Master of Arts degree at the University of Saskatchewan, funded by a Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council together with a College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies 75^th Anniversary Recruitment Scholarship. Eventually, Ava hopes to pursue a doctoral degree in English literature.

Information about other convocation prize winners is available here.

Related Articles