Philip Geddes Memorial Fund

Alex Dymoke
Winner of the 2012
Philip Geddes Prize

Tim Wigmore
Winner of the 2012
Clive Taylor Prize for Sports Journalism

Ian Cheong
Winner of the 2012
St Edmund Hall prize

ISABELLE FRASER: Won the St Edmund Hall Philip Geddes Prize in 2011. Isabelle was editor of The ISIS Magazine in Hilary 2011, and was a director on the board of Oxford Student Publications Ltd. Articles for TheISIS and the Cherwell include an interview with Christopher Hitchens, a Q & A with Nick Clegg and an investigative piece into WikiLeaks, after having interned with them in October 2010 during the release of the Iraq War Logs. This was picked up by The Times and Grazia, and led to appearances on Newsnight, Sky News and NBC News. http://isismagazine.org.uk/2010/12/the-war-on-secrets/

Isabelle is reading History, and hopes to go on to study for an M Phil in Modern European History, focusing on 20th century France. She hopes to use the prize money to fund a trip to China in order to write a story on Chinese activist bloggers. She is 21, from London.

CAMILLA TURNER: Winner of the 2011 Philip Geddes Prize. A former Cherwell editor, Camilla is committed to a career in news and investigative journalism. She used her Geddes prize money to pay for flights to Ghama in the summer vacation, knocking cold on the doors of the Daily Dispatch and The Daily Graphic and persuading them both to give her internships that would give experience of reporting in a very different country. She has already had articles published under her byline in The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Financial Times, The Guardian and The Times. As a former Reporter of the Year in the Guardian Student Media Awards she has also spent a month's internship at the Guardian and, as a Murdoch Scholar, she has also spent three weeks reporting at The Times.

Now 21, she is in her final year reading History at St Catherine's. Her home is in Hampstead, north west London, and she attended North London Collegiate School.

Mehreen Khan
(Trinity College)
Winner of the 2011 Clive Taylor Prize for Sports Journalism.

Henry Clarke Price
(Lady Margaret Hall)
Winner of the 2010 Philip Geddes Prize.

John McManus
( Wadham College)
Winner of the 2010 Clive Taylor Prize for Sports Journalism.

Sarah Karacs
(St Edmund Hall)
Winner of the 2010 St Edmund Hall Prize.

Christopher Baraniuk
(Somerville College)
Winner of the 2009 Philip Geddes Prize.

LAURA PITEL: Runner-up of the 2009 Geddes Prize. Laura was editor of Cherwell in Hilary Term 2008, having started out as news reporter and then news editor. In July Laura was taken on by The Times as one of their graduate trainees.

Laura Pitel graduated 2009 from St Anne’s with a BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies (first class honours). As part of her degree she spent a year abroad living in Damascus, where she worked for Syria Today, an English-language magazine.

Laura was editor of Cherwell in Hilary Term 2008, having started out as news reporter and then news editor. In July Laura was taken on by The Times as one of their graduate trainees.

JAMES APPELL: Winner of the 2009 Clive Taylor Prize for sports journalism, is currently reading for an MPhil in Russian and Eastern European Studies at St Antony’s College.

James Appell is currently reading for an MPhil in Russian and Eastern European Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Football is his first love, and he is currently trying to make his way to watch a match at all of the 14 professional football league grounds in London. While an undergraduate at Keble College he played college football, cricket and pool, was sports editor of the graduate publication the Oxonian Review, and a weekly sportswriter for The Oxford Student.

Appell, 25, a Yorkshireman from Leeds, spent the summer after winning the Clive Taylor prize as a travel writer with Frommer's guides, covering Russia and Eastern Europe. He regularly write sports articles on a freelance basis for publications including skysports.com, ESPN, and When Saturday Comes.

AMANDA DAVIES: Winner of Philip Geddes Prize in 2000. A sports news presenter, producer and reporter for BBC One, Amanda presents live bulletins for the Weekend Breakfast programme and writes and broadcasts weekend sports bulletins on BBC Network News. A Teddy Hall graduate, using the prize to work at the Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation, reporting on the island’s football. She played tennis for Oxford University, and earlier represented her county - Hereford and Worcester.

ALISON ROBERTS: Former arts correspondent, The Times, and arts editor, Evening Standard. 'Winning the Geddes Prize meant an awful lot to me, and certainly helped my subsequent career. The Times took me on as a graduate trainee in 1991 and the Geddes Prize was a wonderful boost to my CV and I'm convinced it helped me to get the job.'

CLAUDIA PARSONS: Winner of the Geddes Prize in 1996 while studying Classics and Italian at Corpus Christi and editing the Oxford Student newspaper.

"I used the money to fund a summer working for Reuters in Rome, an amazing experience that helped me get hired as a trainee at Reuters in 1997. When you're trying to break into journalism, internships are crucial for proving that you can do the job as well as making contacts in the industry. But we all know they don't pay much, if at all. An award like the Geddes Prize can make the difference between a summer as a waitress or a summer learning and building up a file of great clippings to help you win that job when you graduate.

In Rome, I was lucky enough to work for a talented and generous bureau chief who became my mentor for the next 10 years. I've worked for Reuters ever since in London, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Iraq and the United States. I'm now Deputy Enterprise Editor for the Americas, based in New York, where I edit investigative stories."

http://blogs.reuters.com/claudia-parsons/

JASON BURKE (Pembroke): Winner of the 1992 Geddes Prize. He is South Asia correspondent for The Observer and Guardian newspapers. There has been high praise for his latest book, " The 9/11 Wars", Allen Lane, Andrew Robers, historian, writing in The Evening Standard, said: "If journalism is the rough first draft of history, this remarkably balanced, well-sourced and very well written book is an excellent second draft, which will be turned to in the future even by those who do no agree with all of its conclusions." Read the full review in The Evening Standard.

The Economist's review concluded that: "his book is the best overview of the 9/11 decade so far in print. It is also the summation of the career of a fine journalist."

SAMIRA AHMED: Won Geddes prize in 1989. Reporter and presenter for BBC Radio 4 News, PM and The World Tonight, also former presenter for Channel 4. She read English at St Edmund Hall. After Oxford she took a postrgraduate diploma in newspaper journalism at City University. She joined the BBC as a trainee in 1990, and covered the OJ Simpson trial while the BBC's Los Angeles correspondent. She presented Channel 4's documentary series "Islam Unveiled."

RACHEL TRETHEWEY: Won Geddes prize in 1988. Biographer, journalist and academic, wrote the highly praised "Duchess, Mistress of the Arts, the Passionate Life of Georgina, Duchess of Bedford." She read history at St Edmund Hall, and went on to journalism, writing features for the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. After a foray into politics, standing in Devon East for the Liberal Democrats, she moved to biography and is now finishing her PhD at the University of Exeter, where she is researching the life of Anna Letitia Barbauld, a progressive politician of the eighteenth century.

EMMA BROCKES: Former feature writer, The Scotsman; feature writer, The Guardian. 'I have interviewed Jude Law in Berlin, Doris Lessing in North London, and am off to Kosovo to spend a week shadowing bricklayers from Tyneside as they help to rebuild Pristina. When I won the Geddes Prize, I had never won any money - for anything - and the sum involved was great enough to give my confidence a massive boost. It enabled me to fly to the United States and make those initial job contacts which led my becoming a junior arts journalist on the Wall Street Journal; and it stood out on my CV as some kind of assurance of quality.'

ROBERT NORTON: Former writer, The European & Reuters; founder of www.clickmango.com. 'The Geddes Prize changed my life.'

PERNILLE RUDLIN: Head of e-learning, idesk plc. 'Winning the Geddes Prize gave me the chance to go to Brazil to investigate the Japanese community in Sao Paolo. It was an amazing experience and I would never have been able to afford it without the prize.'

LINDA DAVIES: Is a best-selling financial thriller writer who published her first book, Nest of Vipers, in 1994 after a successful career in investment banking. The second undergraduate to win the Geddes prize, she read PPE at St Edmund Hall, where she got involved in Cherwell. She has now published four thrillers and a children's book.

'I was absolutely thrilled when I won the Geddes Prize. One major aspect was to boost my confidence in my own abilities as a writer. This is, I think, the best legacy of the Prize. A writer must have confidence to get up every day and deal with the inevitable blank slate that faces him or her. To know that other people value what you create is enormously important.'