New College Music Student Wins Composing Prize

Leoni Hughes-King - a Music finalist at New College - is a prize winner in the Philip Bates Prize for Composers and Songwriters 2020, which was delayed due to Covid. Her song cycle, Time, is a setting of text from Dylan Thomas's Fern Hill. The poem tells of Thomas’s nostalgia for his rural childhood. 

The judges, from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and Philip Bates Trust, described it as 'gripping and sumptuous' and 'engaging and captivating throughout'. 

Listen to Leoni’s song-cycle, recorded during lockdown by fellow Music finalists Will Prior and Will Harmer.