English Department’s Floyd Prize celebrates ‘true art’ of reading to an audience

Tonbridge boys practised the art of reading aloud for an audience on Wednesday 7 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 102nd year, the competition is named in honour of George Alexander Floyd (1865-1922), a renowned 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, including for this prize.

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. The prize was judged by local poet Neetha Kunaratnam.

The winners were William Churchill (CH1), in the Novi category; Jaden Ayodele (CH3), in the Intermediate; and Freddie Rosin (WH5) 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: William Churchill (CH1): Wind (Ted Hughes) and The Signalman (Charles Dickens)

Daniel Thompson (SH1): The Castle (Edwin Muir) and I, Claudius (Robert Graves)

Daniel Cheung (MH1): The Hollow Men (T.S. Eliot) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)

Paul Alamu (MH1): You Are Old, Father William (Lewis Carroll) and Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)

Intermediate
Winner: Jaden Ayodele (CH3): There is No God (Arthur Hugh Clough) and The Last White Man (Mohsin Hamid)

Sam Ward (HS2): The Odyssey (Homer, transl. Emil Wilson) and The Steppe (Anton Chekov)

Ollie Butcher (PS3): The Straight and Narrow (Simon Armitage) and The Rain Horse (Ted Hughes)

Senior
Winner: Freddie Rosin (WH5): Refugee Blues (WH Auden) and Unravel Me (Tahereh Mafi)

Freddie Mulder (JH4): Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (Dylan Thomas) and A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)

Farlie Willett (Sc4): The Machine (Ted Hughes) and The Dead (James Joyce)