Blunt prize for 2011 awarded to Dr Rory Naismith

This year Council has unanimously agreed to award the prize to Dr. Rory Naismith. He is not only a supremely worthy recipient but happens also, at the age of 27, to be the youngest so far.

Rory has pursued an outstanding academic career at Cambridge and is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College. As joint editor with Mark Blackburn, he has made a significant contribution to Derek Chick's The Coinage of Offa and his Contemporaries, the Society's most recent Special Publication. He is also helping to bring Mark's Viking Coinage and Currency in the British Isles towards publication whilst - at the same time - putting the final touches to his own Special Publication, The Coinage of Southern England 796-865. A complementary volume, Money and Power in Anglo-Saxon England: the Southern English Kingdoms 757-865, on the historical aspects of the period is also being published by Rory through the Cambridge University Press. His extraordinary energy and the productivity of his pen are further manifested by the flow of articles for both numismatic and historical journals.

Rory's stature as a numismatist was recently recognised in his appointment as General Editor and Secretary of the British Academy's Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles. The Society is also greatly indebted to him for his contribution in setting up the Society's independent website and, currently, for organising past copies of the British Numismatic Journal to be made digitally available on the site.

The President conferred the prize on Dr Naismith at the Society's meeting on 25 May 2011.