WKU News

Nicholas Jenkins is the 2024 recipient of the Warren-Brooks Award for his book The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England, published by Harvard University Press. The Island has been hailed as “a Copernican revolution in Auden studies” by Edward Mendelson, Auden’s editor and literary executor.

Jenkins’ publication credits include the New Republic, the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and Vogue, among others. Jenkins is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University.

The selection committee was impressed with the subtlety and nuance of this book, stating that the work made them see Auden’s poetry as a deep response to the modernist poetry of poets of his immediate past, an illumination of his relationship to Georgian poets like Edward Thomas, and an exploration of his special position as a poet of the generation that succeeded the soldier-poets like Sassoon, Graves, and Owen. The committee especially responded to the author’s dense and deeply understood feeling for England of that time.

The Warren-Brooks Award is presented each year by the Robert Penn Warren Center at Western Kentucky University. The award was established by the Warren family to honor an outstanding work of literary scholarship that embodies the spirit, scope, and integrity of the work produced by Warren and his frequent collaborator, Brooks.

Contact: Nancy Dinan, rpw.center@wku.edu