Boys master art of reading for an audience as they compete for annual prize

Tonbridge boys practised the art of reading aloud for an audience on Wednesday night (1 February).

The occasion was the final round of the Floyd Reading Prize, an annual competition run by the School’s English Department.

Now in its 101st year, the competition was named in honour of George Alexander Floyd (1865-1922), a much-loved teacher at Tonbridge between 1890 and 1921. Floyd’s students noted that “he touched life at so many points”: in his will, Floyd left generous bequests to the School.

Jonathan Reinhardt, Head of English, said: “The Floyd Reading Prize celebrates a true art, that of reading out loud for an audience. Masters at this art make poems, stories, and novels come alive and give them meaning.

“They lodge our favourite characters, chapters, lines and verse in our memories, often forever. This is the art of the audiobook, the podcast, the voiceover, the bedtime story, the public reading.”

Floyd Prize finalists compete in three categories – Novi, Intermediate and Senior – with boys reading one poem and one prose passage.

This year’s judge was Francesca Bailey, the School’s Drama Director in Residence. Francesca has many years of experience both as an actor and an academic.

The winners were Oscar Sanders (OH1), in the Novi category; Ethan Glucina (PS3), in the Intermediate; and Sam Edwards (PS4) in the Senior, with all finalists and their readings listed below.

Winners receive a book prize, while the English Department also awards winners the Junior English Society Tie (Novi and Intermediate) and Senior English Society Tie (Sixth Form).

This year’s winners, finalists and readings were as follows.
Novi
Winner: Oscar Sanders (OH1): Education for Leisure (Carol Ann Duffy) and Millions (Frank Cottrell-Boyce)

Huw Thomas (OH1): Ozymandias (Percy Bysshe Shelley) and The Barque of the Brothers (Hans Baumann)

Nico Swainson (SH1): Break, Break, Break (Alfred Lord Tennyson) and The Amber Spyglass (Philip Pullman)

Sam Ward (HS1): Ode to Autumn (John Keats) and The Call of Cthulhu (H.P.Lovecraft)

Intermediate
Winner: Ethan Glucina (PS3): Blessing (Imtiaz Dharker) and I Am Malala (Malala Yousafzai)

Ben Adams (OH3): The Aeneid, Book 2 (Virgil) and A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)

Farlie Willett  (Sc3): Insomniac (Sylvia Plath) and The Prophet (Kahlil Gibran)

Sacha Gibson (HS3): The Way through the Woods (Rudyard Kipling) and  Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

Senior
Winner: Sam Edwards (PS4): Digging  (Seamus Heaney) and Killing Floor (Lee Child)

Jean van der Spuy (FH4): Patroling Barnegat (Walt Whitman) and We (Yevgeny Zamyatin)

Marcus Cheung (PS4): View with a Grain of Sand (Wisława Szymborska) and
The Very Pulse of the Machine (Michael Swanwick)

Philip Dorn (JH5): Sonnet 65 (William Shakespeare) and The Birth of Tragedy (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Pictured above and below: The Floyd Reading Prize final, taking place in Skinners’ Library.