This year’s EASLCE Best Graduate Student Essay Prize has gone to Gabriele d’Amato. He holds a Joint PhD in Literary Studies from Ghent University (Belgium) and the University of L’Aquila (Italy). From October 2026, he will be FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University. Drawing on narrative theory, New Formalism, and the environmental humanities, his publications engage with subjects including the cultural and ecological potential of storytelling, the intersection of narrative theory and cultural memory studies, and queer ecological formalism. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Critique, Frontiers of Narrative Studies, ISLE,Memory Studies, Storyworlds, and Studies in the Novel. He is the co-editor of three forthcoming special issues (Between2026; Storyworlds 2027; Memory Studies Review 2028).
The prize consists of a stipend of 500 Euros to help cover the costs of attending the next EASLCE conference (as the prize was announced in the spring of 2026 it could be spent at the easlce conference in Utrecht) and the opportunity to publish the essay in Ecozon@. The jury decided jointly that Gabriele d’Amato’s essay “Material and Epistemic Extraction in Eco-Spy Fiction” aptly fulfills the requirements of the prize. It contributes to an important field in ecocriticism, namely econarratology, by exploring the relationship between form and content in eco-spy fiction, a genre that intermingles espionage and extractivist logics in the Anthropocene. The prize was formally awarded at the 11th Biennial EASLCE conference in Utrecht in April 2026
