As the academic year draws to a close, the most anticipated list in all of Oxford is finally here!

This year’s BNOC nomination form received 331 responses over the course of ten days, with the final response coming in just 14 seconds before the form closed (you’ve got to admire the procrastination of an Oxford student). The form allowed three nominations per submission, and nearly 350 people from across the University were nominated at least one time.

Unsurprisingly, the most nominated category in this list was the Oxford Union. There were 221 nominations in which an affiliation with the Union proved to be a person’s strongest category. Not far behind was the category of ‘Other’. While this list does tend to get a reputation for platforming the union hacks of the year (and in some ways this year’s list is no different), it is interesting how many characters around Oxford defy a specific sort of categorisation. It should also be noted that a few people were nominated for different categories over time, speaking to both the fact that certain societies attract people with similar interests (political societies and the Oxford Union being a particularly strong pairing) and also the perhaps over-extended nature of the extremely motivated Oxford student.

The category which received the fewest number of individual nominations was Sport, sitting at only 45. This might have to do with many sports taking place at a college level, while this list has a broader university-wide scope. Journalism was only slightly higher, though six members of Cherwell’s own senior editorial team (including EICs) were nominated, alongside a handful of former editors. 

But being a BNOC is generally more than just an affiliation with a specific society – many people are in the Oxford Union, but only some become elevated to the status of ‘union hack’. It takes a certain kind of personality or ambition to rise to the more recognisable of the close to 26,800 students affiliated with the University. At the very least, they probably needed to be following Cherwell on Instagram or have an acquaintance at least tangentially involved who might have shared our survey link. Beyond the broad categories, survey respondents also answered an open-ended question about why a person was, in fact, a BNOC. Responses varied from a specific list of someone’s qualifications to the very general “everything” (given as a reason for six nominations). 

But what turned a nominee into a BNOC on the list? For some, it was the simple act of responding to our email request for a description and photo after initially sorting through the data; we have to have enough names to fill out the list, after all. Other components taken into account included the role of the nominee within Oxford’s university society at large and, of course, the number of nominations received (though we attempted to look a bit critically at responses which seemed particularly like a spam or ‘hacked’ nomination).

This year’s list also reflects a tumultuous time for Oxford students in the limelight. While you may recognise some headshots on this list from previous years, or indeed from previous Cherwell articles, we’ve also tried to change things up a bit. Hopefully, this list provides both some familiar and new faces, no matter how involved you might be with some of the more public-facing Oxford societies.

1. George Abaraonye

Univ PPE, former Union President-Elect, perpetual Oxford figure with headphones. Returned from rustication to collect his BNOC crown, and signed off his acceptance email with “toodles”. 

2. Arwa Elrayess

Oxford Union’s first Arab woman president, who arrived promising stability and delivered anything but that. Cherwell is happy to see a woman in male-dominated fields. 

3. Overheard at Oxford 

Self-proclaimed reformed ex-Cherwell hater. Proud to say that the “masses still flock to hear the propaganda”. Oxford’s most un-anonymous anonymous Instagram account. 

4. Harry Aldridge 

New College PPE, Media Soc president, 93% Club president, Union Secretary, and subject of a JCR no-confidence motion. Running Oxford’s institutions one at a time, the last one pushed back. 

5. Sanaa Pasha 

Sanaa wants us to make it clear that although she describes herself as a ‘dramatist’, it’s not in a pretentious way. Though, as OUDs President, co-founder of Riptide Studio, and a writer and director, it’s safe to say she’s earned a bit of self-importance. 

6. Roxi Rusu 

STANNER with a Google Calendar that would give a tutor palpitations. Rows, regattas, reggaeton nights, and international security. Doing it all for the joie de vivre, apparently. 

7. Agastya Rao 

Marked out by a distinctive yellow rubber duck in his pocket, Agastya has dedicated his two years at Oxford to such serious pursuits as the Keble Brick Challenge and the Oxford Sign Challenge (no, it’s not a thing).

8. R. O. N. 

Re-Open Nominations. Oxford’s most principled and committed candidate, never wins, never quits, technically running for everything. We salute the consistency. 

9. Jessica Maxine Wood

POV: You’ve been nominated for the world’s most prestigious BNOC list. Instagram’s favourite Aussie Oxford ‘Lawfluencer’, Jessica is known for her heavily-vignetted dark academia edits of damp streets and overworked Rad Cam occupants.

10. Tresor Nsengiyumva

Queen’s PPE fresher who “got weird for a week, got some spring weeks, and then started running for the Union for bants”. First-year energy at its most unhinged and admirable. 

11. Esme Somerside Gregory 

There’s a good chance Esme is the only Physics student to (ever?) make the BNOC list. Writer and director of the OUDs National Tour play, and Co-Pres of Oxford Physics Gender Equity Network, it’s impossible to walk down the street with Esme without her being stopped by someone she knows every five minutes. 

12. Gilon Fox 

A familiar face in OUDs, having ended up as Treasurer last year, and co-running Tiptoe Productions, Gilon is best known for his Oxford Playhouse Performances. You might also recognise him from Fight Night at the town hall, where he competed as ‘Gilon “60 Seconds” Fox’, and didn’t last very long.

13. Hussain’s

The Platonic ideal of the Oxford kebab van. The light at the end of the suffocating tunnel we call ‘Bridge’. 

14. Zagham Farhan

Zagham was nominated for heading “one of the most irrelevant political societies at Oxford”. That didn’t really narrow it down, but you can also spot him delivering one of his “near weekly speeches” in the Union, if you have entirely exhausted your will to live.

15. Benedict Masters 

Statement attributable to an Oxford Union spokesperson: “The nominee the Editors-in-Chief have a sweet spot for. Union Director of Press, who can be found anywhere but in Oxford. Has gracefully accepted the title ‘Socially Acceptable Boris Johnson’.”

16. Harriet Dolby

LMH historian, OUCA President, who somehow made Jeremy Hunt the least controversial person she invited this term. Spent Trinity filling rooms with people, the country has largely stopped listening to. Impressive logistically, whatever you think of the guests.

17. Ezana Betru

Director and co-founder of Riptide Studio, Ezana can be recognised from innumerable plays. His lead role in a Playhouse production next term will be his 15th show in Oxford, which means he’s either failing his degree, or a time-traveller. Cherwell has launched an investigation. 

18. Jerome Pailing

Being tall isn’t necessarily a personality trait, but it certainly does help make John’s JCR President Jerome easy to spot across the bar. Cherwell commends his enviable ability to make a room full of men instantly insecure, as they mumble “height doesn’t matter”. 

19. Anita Okunde

Former President of the Oxford Union, Anita describes herself as “literally just a girl trying to survive finals”. Her startup Vox Populi Collective, meanwhile, promises to train up the next generation of hacks (read: material for Jevelyn).

20. Sam Gosmore 

Another high-ranking thespian, Sam has been in 14 OUDs productions during his two years at Oxford, and will be leading two Playhouse shows next term. His most common pose, in his own words, is to “stare meaningfully into the middle distance under stage lights”. Profoundly affecting, we’re sure.

21. Catherine Oyinkan Kola Balogun 

From SU President-Elect to editor at a ‘paper’ that shall not be named, Catherine’s litany of extra-curriculars makes a certain no-conned JCR Pres look lazy. Catherine has “ended up involved in a bit of everything at Oxford”, and her frequent Instagram presence ensures her BNOC-hood.

22. David Quan 权丁文

Wolfson MSc, podcaster, future SU president for postgrads. Insisted that BNOC stands for “Big Names, One Community”. Many fellow nominees would beg to disagree. 

23. Saara Lunawat

St John’s law fresher, running for Union secretary uncontested. Either extremely talented or extremely intimidating. We suspect both. Also wrote for the ‘Oxford Studebnt’.

24. Euan Willis

A fresher who can reliably be found drinking his way through Union events and Oxford’s political societies, Euan is pretty much the archetypal OLC hack, and received one of his nominations for “being a lad”. Right. 

25. Macaulay Fergusson

One half of Wadham Entz, Macaulay has spent his first year trying to make up for the abysmal reputation of the college bar. Looks like he’s been having fun, but Cherwell would question whether spamming Instagram stories with AI slop is what Dorothy would have wanted.

26. ChatWSam

Sam’s claim to BNOC fame is “loving formals and Oxford college life”. Best known for his reels rating Oxford formals, and for arranging ‘An Evening with STP. Reviews’, he is sure to pop up on your suggested reels when you have an essay due in an hour.

27. NightSchool

Laughing in the face of Finals, Nahom Lemma and Ethan Penny, the DJs and founders of NightSchool, have gone from strength to strength, now a familiar part of the college ball landscape for those who failed to procure a more original performer.

28. Christina Robinson

The woman who paints everyone’s nails in Spoons, runs the freshers group chat, and has visited nearly every college. Tragically, has not made it to Queen’s or Pembroke. Someone figure this out. 

29. Cherwell EiCs 

Oxford’s oldest independent student newspaper (did you know we’re IPSO-regulated?) Somehow still letting the editors nominate themselves. Standards are slipping. 

30. The Isis EiCs

Oxford’s other literary institution. Classier than us, allegedly. We’re sure the BNOC list would be much better illustrated had it been organised by them. 

When interviewed on his decision to cast Travis Scott as a bard figure in his upcoming The Odyssey adaptation, set to release on 17th July in the UK, Christopher Nolan stated that “I cast him because I wanted to nod towards the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap”. This statement has provoked reactionary backlash on social media and within cultural conversation. The film is clearly not claiming to be a faithful representation of Grecian warfare with negative commentary particularly revolving around Nolan’s diversion from traditional adaptation. This aversion to Scott’s casting, in spite of his previous work with Nolan on Tenet (2020), works alongside an anger at the film’s casting of non-white actors as figures in the Homeric epic. 

This is certainly not a novel perspective; ever since the ‘Golden Age’ of hip-hop, spanning from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the genre has rapidly innovated in both style and lyricism. Not only was it drawing upon the beats and riffs of other genres like jazz and soul, often sampling from these areas, but its technique shifted, increasing in complexity. Later, rap became far quicker in pace and flow, popularised by hip-hop visionary Rakim, who introduced a soft-spoken style of rapping and popularised the flow credited to this Golden Age. Lyricism drastically evolved also: variations on rhyme were popularised, with more internal rhyming, off-beat and multi-syllabic rhymes. These lyrics also became less focused on the “party rhymes” of the old-school era, but were highly conscious of sociopolitical issues, particularly racial politics, crime, religion, and the failures of government. Sounds were determined by the building of community spaces in specific areas, rather than being defined by marketing strategies.

Notably, this combination of developments within the genre also brought about the emergence of something even more overtly literary in its approach. It would be impossible to note down every prominent entry into this Golden Age and post-Golden Age canon, which utilises complex poetic techniques. And yet, MF DOOM’s ‘My Favorite Ladies’ is an extended metaphor where he appears to speak about relationships with various women, who are actually all personifications of drugs, considering his dependency on them. Lauryn Hill uses similes on ‘How Many Mics’ to show bravado, rapping that “me without a mic is like a beat without a snare”, but also to display angst and betray vulnerability when she says “loving you is like a battle/and we both end up with scars” on ‘Ex-Factor’. Jay-Z has always been known for his slick entendres, like on ‘Brooklyn Go Hard’: “I father, I Brooklyn-Dodger them/I jack, I rob, I sin/Aw, man, I’m Jackie Robinson/’Cept when I run base, I dodge the pen”. The intricacies of rap lyricism should require no justification; take one look at the giants of hip-hop, and it’s written all over their work. 
As a result, since the 1990s, more scholarly work has been written on rap’s relationship to poetry. Brent Wood highlights its proximity to ‘folk-poetry’, with its “relatively free borrowing of music and words between practitioners”, it being “locally-oriented”, not assumptive of literacy, and “a union rather than a separation of music, dance, and lyric”. Folk-poetry, a more traceable evolution of the ‘oral tradition’ Nolan refers to, indicates a liberation of poetry from academic application, existing outside of a canonisation of what is considered literary art. The foundation of rap in the 1970s was on the back of political poetic heritage of the 1960s and various African-American traditions such as Signifying, playing the Dozens, and Toasting, which all showcase verbal dexterity and prowess in exchanges of ritual insults. What emerged was rap, all about the ‘power of the word’, creating a new oral tradition that was reliant upon rhyme and rhythm, just as poetry is.

The other thing worth noting is that often, contemporary poetic works forgo meter and the stricter rhythmic techniques which categorised earlier iterations of the medium, instead latching on to a writing style that is far more abstract. ‘Tipp-Ex-Sonate’ by Koos Kombius is a poem infamous for completely forgoing words altogether, a punctuation-based form that is praised as a commentary on censorship and segregation. Contemporary poets feel no need to abide by formalist structures, and if the boundaries of the medium can be disturbed for their creative license, why would we not extend music artists the same grace of medium? Musical backing could be seen as a literalisation of the rhythm implicit in metre and rhyme. Examples of poetic formations within rap appear potently and often. Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Triumph’ utilises internal rhymes sibilance and fricative alliteration to execute with explosive power their erudite understanding of sound and speech: “I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies and hypotheses/Can’t define how I be droppin’ these mockeries/Lyrically perform armed robbery/Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me”. Dr Marcyliena Morgan called rap the “poetry of generation”, but it may be more than that. Rap has become so influential to the cultural consciousness – shaping fashion, slang usage, and seeping so far into the mainstream musical landscape – that it has dominated every aspect of it. Its prowess in pop culture is so much so that Nolan’s decision could be read less as an artistic one but more as pandering to popular demand. It is difficult to diagnose how rap music will factor into The Odyssey until its release, but the statement alone, however genuine it will prove to be, honours an evolution in the legacy of oral storytelling. 

It seems obvious that the aversion to making such a comparison between the long-standing poetic canon and the rap tradition as we know it, is on the back of a racially charged understanding of what are considered ‘low’ and ‘high art’ forms. Rap is implicitly working class in its thematics of social justice, racial politics, and institutional indiscretion. NWA pioneered this explicitly with their 1988 album Straight Outta Compton, later adapted into a social realist, award-winning film, bridging the boundary between the higher and lower mediums. More recently, ‘Cop Shot The Kid’ by Nas and Kanye West discusses the murders of Aiyana Jones and Aderrien Murry: “Tell me, who do we call to report crime/ If 911 doin’ the drive-by?” Music is community-based, and rap has been a method of expression among the Black working class since its conception. Its popular appeal and anti-elitist thematics has historically lowered its status as a medium. Right-wing presenter Geraldo Rivera famously said “hip-hop has done more damage to young African Americans than racism in recent years” in response to Kendrick Lamar’s BET Award set. The irony of this sentence is obvious, but it also indicates a stance taken within Western culture. 

Comparisons between the two were marked out around 30 years ago, and in all accounts, the idea that rap and poetry are crucially linked is well-established. The refusal to believe this, in spite of its backing in scholarship, comes as an almost elitist impulse. To say that rap is less impactful than its ‘proper’ poetic predecessors is to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of literary art.