The winner is Sameera Chawla for her submission “Wonderful Resonance, Resonant Wonder: Marvelling and Remembering in The Story Girl and The Golden Road.”
Chawla’s essay was the unanimous choice of the four judges (Lesley Clement, Brenton Dickieson, Alan MacEachern, and E. Holly Pike). They found her essay to be solidly argued and well-researched, showing an excellent balance and integration of critical and theoretical sources, including new material from the recent “L.M. Montgomery and Re-vision” conference and a response to the conference’s roundtable on equity, diversity, and inclusion. Beyond enriching one’s reading of The Story Girl and The Golden Road, Chawla’s paper is also simply a literary delight – an elegantly written piece, with a wonderful flow to the sentences and resonant diction.
Sameera Chawla is a writer and independent scholar based in India. She holds an MA in English from the University of Delhi and is about to join the University of Cambridge for an MPhil in Education (Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature).
As the 2022 winner of the Epperly Award, Chawla will receive a certificate, an expedited peer review if she chooses to submit her essay for publication in the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies, plus a complimentary registration at the 2024 LMMI conference. Her win will also be recognized publicly on the LMMI’s website and social media channels, at the 2024 conference, and on a plaque in the LMMI space in UPEI’s Robertson Library.