Writing prize heads north

Heather Leach, senior lecturer in contemporary arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, has won this year's Palgrave Macmillan/ Times Higher humanities and social sciences writing prize.

Dr Leach, whose research interests include fiction writing and the pedagogy of creative writing, wrote an essay arguing against narrative flow. It wins her £2,000 and is published in this week's paper.

David Howarth of Clare College, Cambridge, a lecturer in land economy and a teacher in Cambridge University's law faculty, won the second prize of Palgrave Macmillan books to the value of £500 for his essay on how academics should stand up to attacks on the law.

The third prize of books to the value of £200 went to Aidan Harris of Chesham, who argued that the law should include positive obligations, with people being punished not only for doing something bad, but for not doing something good.

The essay competition, which attracted a record 98 entries, this year left entrants free to write about anything they wanted rather than asking them to write on the theme of a supplied quote. The judges were Times Higher columnist Gary Day, principal lecturer in English at De Montfort University; Simon Glendinning, director of the forum for European philosophy at the London School of Economics; and Cora Kaplan, professor of English at Southampton University.