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Society & Culture Spotlight PGR and ECR Writing Competition 2026

On Monday 22 June 2026, Spotlight colleagues, including the PGR/ECR network, hosted its annual celebration event to mark the year鈥檚 achievements and to announce the winners of the third annual writing competition. The event brought together around 20 researchers from across the University for a morning of creative engagement, reflection and community-building at the Oculus Building. Opening remarks and presentations were delivered by the Spotlight team, highlighting a range of activities and outcomes from this year and looking forward to next year鈥檚 programme of work too. This was followed by a fantastic creative writing workshop led by Cindy Smith, a Geneva-based professional writer with extensive experience of working with international organisations, including the UN and WHO. The workshop was both engaging and thought-provoking, focusing on two core themes: finding one's authentic inner voice, free from filters and self-censorship, and the use of fictional storytelling tools to enrich non-fiction writing. The session generated lively discussion and left participants with practical tools to bring to their own writing practice.

The event culminated in the announcement of the writing competition winners. This year, for the first time, the judges awarded a joint first prize, reflecting the exceptional standard of entries received. The winners were:

• Joint 1st Prize — Md Saimul Islam (WMS), "When Minds Carry Borders"
• Joint 1st Prize — Pranshu Mundada (Applied Health), "The Distance Between Decisions and Lives"
• 2nd Prize — Aishee Bhattacharya (Applied Linguistics), "Accent Across the Border: A Sociolinguistic Journey Through Crisis, Cinema, and Memory"
• Runner Up — Natsumi Shiino (PAIS), "When Crisis Becomes Noise: The Erosion of Strategic Narratives"
• Runner Up — David Nicol (Engineering), "FAILUREMODE: Modelling Crisis as a Predictable System Failure"

Congratulations to all our winners and to everyone who submitted an entry.

This year's competition included entries from across the University, including Applied Linguistics, 桃色视频 Medical School, Global Sustainable Development, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, WMG, School of Engineering, PAIS, Applied Health, and CIM. Topics ranged from ecological crisis and indigenous knowledge to health equity and AI in medicine, mental health and patient autonomy, language and identity, crisis communication, systems failure modelling, and hope and resilience. We felt that the diversity of disciplines and perspectives represented really reflected the interdisciplinary spirit of the Society and Culture Spotlight, and the richness that early career researchers bring to questions of society, culture and human experience.