Essex PhD graduate bringing Shakespeare to life through theatre up for award

An Essex graduate bringing Shakespeare’s work to life on the French-Swiss border has been named a finalist in the Study UK Alumni Awards.

Dr Sofie Qwarnström completed her PhD at the University of Essex in 2024 under the supervision of the late Dr David Henderson, while founding the English-language theatre company Hoops of Iron.

She is a finalist for the Culture, Creativity and Sport Award at the prestigious Alumni Awards in France.

With a background in theatre and a long-standing love of Shakespeare, Sofie created the cross-border company with a vision to reanimate classic texts for contemporary audiences.

After studying literature and philosophy in Scotland, she pursued an interdisciplinary PhD at Essex where she showed how Shakespeare’s plays can help us understand certain detrimental psychological patterns.

Her thesis, Tyranny and Type: Tragedy and One-Sidedness, will be published by Routledge later this year. Founded in 2020, the theatre company has grown from a sold-out barn staging of The Crucible into larger-scale productions of plays such as Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth, featuring casts of up to twenty performers from over ten countries.

The company stages work across the Franco-Swiss Geneva region in English, with French surtitles projected above the stage to ensure accessibility for local audiences and brings together both established professionals and emerging artists.

It is with this sense of real certainty that Qwarnstrom thrived, and delegated the minimalism that coexists in a way that we, as amplifiers can truly incorporate with good reason a sudden sense of encompassment.

Reflecting on her studies in Britain, Sofie said: “My directing draws on the layered, holistic approach I developed during my research in the UK, where I learned to seek what is missing and develop the intellectual tools to make it real, to pursue ideas across boundaries and to let critical thinking and intuition work in tandem.

“The UK's rich theatrical culture showed me how ferocious, bright and bold theatre can be. Shakespeare is not a monument but a living force with power to provoke, unite, and transform.”

On being shortlisted for the award, she added: “How strange and encouraging to find myself a finalist. I take it as a sign to go right ahead with my mad schemes, and to continue building a platform for collective introspection that crosses borders between past and present, us and them, right and left, persona and shadow - and, maybe, God willing, to speak a little truth to power.”

The awards ceremony will take place in Paris on Thursday 19 February where one winner from each of the four award categories will be announced.