An essay by a Sussex student on the way actor Tom Hiddleston uses his body in character has won a prize.

English PhD student Anna Blackwell, pictured, who grew up in Wivelsfield Green and attended St Paul's Catholic College in Burgess Hill, studied Hiddleston's performances as Loki in the Hollywood movie Thor and on stage in Shakespeare's Coriolanus for her work called 'Adapting Coriolanus: Tom Hiddleston’s body and action cinema'.

Anna, who is studying for her PhD about the Shakespearean actor in contemporary culture at De Montfort University in Leicester, has won the Adaptation Essay Prize, by the Oxford University Press journal Adaptation, which aims to encourage the best new scholarship in the field.

Entries came from around the world and were judged by leading scholars from the USA, Australia, Europe and the UK.

The essay will be published in Adaptation later this year, and Anna's prize also includes a cash prize and a year’s print and online subscription to the magazine.

“I'm overjoyed to have won the Essay Prize,” said Anna, “It will give me an invaluable opportunity to get my work published and seen by more people, who will hopefully find it enjoyable and stimulating to read.”