The Modern Language Association of America today announced it will award the thirteenth Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters.  The winning edition is The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, volumes 1 and 2: Correspondence, edited by R. K. R. Thornton, of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and Catherine Phillips, of Downing College, Cambridge, and published by Oxford University Press.

The committee’s citation states that:

‘R. K. R. Thornton and Catherine Phillips’s superb editorial work in these volumes of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins shows the poet crafting his letters, canceling, inserting, and adjusting words, reexamining even the most casual utterance. The chronological arrangement importantly includes all known letters to Hopkins from his correspondents. The result is a moving narrative of intellectual and poetic growth, revealing (along with much else) the writer’s attraction to early Welsh verse and its meters. The editors’ introduction, timetables, annotations, biographical register of Hopkins’s correspondents, and index are exemplary.’