Bill Bryson Prize awards ceremony 2014
Best-selling author Bill Bryson joined the winners of the annual science prize we organise in his name at an awards ceremony at Speakers House at Westminster.
Competitors from across the UK joined our international winner, from Romania, as well as proud family, friends and teachers, and were welcomed by our immediate past president, Professor Lesley Yellowlees, who is part of the final judging panel along with Bill.
Lesley hosted the event, welcoming those responsible for the cream of the record 540 entries this year, addressing the theme of where is the science in art and where is the art in science?
Listen to the full interview with Bill Bryson...
Lesley Yellowlees said: "It’s just a delight for me to welcome you all to this wonderful event. The Bill Bryson prize that is done in conjunction with the Royal Society of Chemistry is a really popular competition. It’s designed to encourage and recognise clear science communication in schools and colleges.
"The winning entries all fill the brief beautifully. They all fill it very differently – I think that’s one of the excitements of judging this competition – it also makes our job very difficult because there’s so many ways these days that we can communicate.
"It makes our job hard but also great fun".
This year’s overall winner was Brynn Brunnstrom, from St Paul’s School in London, who wrote, illustrated and narrated a fantastic short film, challenging preconceptions that science and art don’t mix.
The international winner was Muresan Vlad, from Romania, whose stunning anatomical artwork examined Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man in closer detail.
Bill Bryson congratulated this year’s competitors for their brilliance, underlining how inspiring he finds it to take part in judging the competition.
He said: "These kids are so imaginative and they’re so funny. They come up with so many new ideas that I end up feeling quite dazzled by it all.
"They are genuinely inspiring in the sense that every one of them is a very vivid reminder that science can be fun.
"That’s a lesson that took me a long time to learn and that in some ways I’m still learning. I was taught science so poorly in school when I was growing up in the middle of America in the 1950s and 60s that it crushed any possible interest I had in it.
"What these young competitors are showing again and again is that was wrong. Science is always, I mean always, interesting, fascinating, useful.
"All of those things that you would want any human enterprise to be, science has it in spades."
Interview with Bill Bryson: Can science be creative?
The best-selling author of "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" talks to the Royal Society of Chemistry's Edwin Silvester at the 2014 Bill Bryson Prize awards ceremony.
