McEachran Prize 2026

If ever a teacher at Shrewsbury could be said to have come close to achieving immortality, it must the legendary Frank McEachran, ‘Kek’ to his pupils, of which the writer of this piece was one of the last before he died in post in 1976 after a 40-year career at Shrewsbury.

The competition, not for the fainthearted, requires pupils to choose a very brief piece of text, from any source, and give a 4-minute talk on any aspect of it. There is no blueprint. Interest, coherence and relevance to the text take precedence over anything performative. Over the past 25 years the competition has attracted entrants from an increasingly wide spread of disciplines, with an even spread of entrants from the Third Form to the Upper Sixth.

Forty-two hopefuls entered this year, a record by quite a margin, so that the competition has had to be split between the Lower and Upper School, with the Upper School competition taking place on Tuesday 27th January and the Lower School scheduled for 10th February.

A thoughtful and amusing talk by Alanood A (U6, MSH) set the tone for the evening, with a meditation on the phrase ‘May contain nuts’, the phrase, in her case, found on the Cadbury’s mini rolls she happened to be eating when thinking about the forthcoming competition. Naturally AI gatecrashed, in the shape of an excellent talk by Elsa L (L6, M) on the commandment ‘Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind’ from the Orange Catholic Bible in Frank Herbert’s 1956 science fiction novel Dune.

Choosing a winner from a series of talks of consistently high quality was as ever a challenge, but the judge, Richard Hudson, singled out as the winner Giulia C (U6, G) who used a short metaphorical passage about figs from Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar to talk about the importance of commitment in a world of endless choices. Highly commended was Cordelia B (L6, Q), with a talk based on a lyric from a 2012 song Ride by Lana del Rey.  

In his closing remarks the judge commented on a common theme in many of the talks, always a preoccupation of the young, but with an especial relevance to the current era: how to create meaning in an increasingly confusing and chaotic world.

Richard Hudson