In 1982 at the suggestion of William Llewellyn, Festival Conductor from 1981 to 1995, the Festival adopted a policy of offering an annual Leith Hill Award. This goes to a singing student at one of the London music colleges nominated as outstanding by each of the colleges in rotation. The Award takes the form of an engagement with a fee well above the normal student rate.

The current award winner is soprano Ruth Jenkins.

Ruth graduated in 2008 from the University of Cambridge where she was a choral scholar of Jesus College Chapel Choir. She notably sang the soprano solo on the NAXOS recording of Charles Wood's St. Mark Passion and gave several principle performances in the university opera society.

Ruth is currently a second year postgraduate studying with Lillian Watson and Audrey Hyland at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She made it to the final round of the prestigious Richard Lewis and Jean Shanks Competition and has been accepted into the Royal Academy of Music's Song Circle, through which she will be performing at the Wigmore Hall in February.

This year Ruth has performed with Sir Thomas Allen and Malcolm Martineau at Auckland Castle, with Stephen Cleobury and the Choir of King's College Cambridge at St. David's Hall in Cardiff, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Gentlemen of St. John's College Cambridge, with Daniel Hyde and the Chameleon Arts Orchestra, with the Brandenburg Sinfonia at St. Martin in the Fields, at the Royal Opera House Hamyln Hall, and has premiered Zou Jianping's Symphonic Poem with the City of London Sinfonia.

The complete list of LHMF Award winners is