Prize-Winning
The Harbingers' Prize 2023
Dust Unto Dust
Doing things by the book is boring. And when you're a reader for a competition, the last thing you want to read is another by-the-book, rigidly structured essay. So I tried to think outside of the box for this competition. There were five categories, of which I chose Reportage Photography, in which you combine images and language to tell a story. Then, you picked from five subject lines. I chose to combine two: How will the world end and my 50th birthday. Couple that with an unorthodox narrator, and you have one of my favorite pieces that I've written. I won the second place prize for this piece.
Trinity College Linguistics Essay Prize
In this essay, I explored the role of metaphor in language, particularly its usage in the political sphere. Writing this essay was pretty mind-blowing; it's hard to understand just how much metaphor figures into our daily lives until you start reading it. For example, technically the way we talk about argument is a metaphor: you can win or lose, you can 'attack weak points', you can 'defend your argument' -- in this way, we're technically metaphorizing argument in terms of war. Isn't that kind of crazy?
I was awarded a Top 10 Placement in the 2024 Essay Prize.
I had the honor of being interviewed and featured in the November 27th 2023 edition of ChinaDaily, and I later wrote a short feature on John Steinbeck's East of Eden.
