Winners announced: Kendrew Songwriting Competition 2026
Now in its fifth year, the Kendrew Songwriting Competition is open to all current students at the University of Oxford. Entries may be in any genre, style, tradition or language, but must be original and must not have won a prize in any other competition.
Submissions were reviewed this year by Sarah Hill (Associate Professor of Popular Music at the Faculty of Music and Fellow and Tutor at St Peter's College); Samuel Boateng (Career Development Research Fellow in Music at St John's College); Jason Stanyek (Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Faculty of Music and Fellow and Tutor at St John’s College).
The judging panel commented on the extraordinary diversity of submissions in this year’s competition, with songs ranging from heavy metal to folk, alternative rock to neo soul. This diversity is indicative of the broad and wide-ranging interests of the University’s song-writing community.
First and second prize were awarded to Oliver Spooner (Lincoln) and Tyné Angela Freeman (Queen’s) respectively. Tegan Addison (St John’s) and Christopher Butler-Cole (Wolfson) also received honorable mentions. Recording of all four songs and brief descriptions can be found in the tabs below.
Oli is a second-year undergraduate music student at Lincoln College.
'Effervescent' is a joyful song about Oli's complicated relationship with music, exploring how it has been both a source of comfort and a struggle throughout his life. Oli admits that writing the song was both a 'therapeutic and revealing process', which reflected his love, fear, apprehension and passion towards music. He hopes that listeners will experience the same fun he had writing it and maybe dance along.
You can listen to Oli's other works on Spotify.
Tyné Angela Freeman is a first-year doctoral student in music at The Queen's College.
'Helium' is a neo-soul composition that explores the tension of shaping language around the experience of love. Tyné describes how the lyrics 'took shape as a kind of meta-reflection: an attempt to write a love song while simultaneously questioning whether it’s possible to to find words for an experience so ephemeral and difficult to pin down'. The sense of words being inadequate to contain feelings is mirrored structurally; Tyné's verses are lyrically dense, filled with multisyllabic lines that convey a sense of striving toward precision.
Listen to 'Helium' here.
Tegan Addison is a third-year undergraduate music student at St John's College.
'Say What You Mean' was inspired by a snippet of an argument overheard between a couple in an Oxford coffee shop. The song explores frustration, vengefulness and emotional miscommunication in what Tegan describes as 'an overtly theatrical and melodramatic style'. The song's influences are diverse: from Olivia Rodrigo to Queen, Kate Bush to Wolf Alice.
Listen to 'Say What You Mean' here.
Christopher Butler-Cole is an MSt student in music at Wolfson College.
'PIER' explores the difficulty of resisting someone (or something) that you know will hurt you and the pain of being contorted between competing emotions. Christopher's lyrics are inspired by David Bowie's cut-up method, randomly rearranging words from poetry and other sources to produce 'disjointed, oneiric combinations'. This instability in the words mirrors the harmonic instability of the song itself.