On behalf of the IABS Joint Presidents and the Elma Dangerfield Prize Committee, we would like to congratulate Dr. Michael Steier as this year’s winner of the Elma Dangerfield Prize.

Dr. Steier’s monograph Byron, Hunt, and the Politics of Literary Engagement (London: Routledge, 2019) explicates the literary relationship between Byron and Leigh Hunt, exploring a relationship that would help define Byron’s poetry.

This study will provide an invaluable resource to Byron scholars as much as Hunt scholars.

In the words of the award committee, the book "charts the sometimes rivalrous and sometimes collaborative relationship from Byron and Hunt's earliest days of juvenilia and literary satire, to their radical political crusades, Italophile poetics and founding of a journal. It demonstrates unequivocally that the friendship between Byron and Hunt has been previously underestimated and oversimplified. An assured performance, this is a hugely enjoyable book…

This monograph will become the reference book on the Hunt/Byron connection, as well as a very useful resource on Byron generally, and on a large cast of figures, coteries, and literary-cultural phenomena from the 1810s to the 1820s."