The other writing

On whether the moral universe bends

The essay takes the line at its word and answers no on both counts. History shows the arc bending toward force, not justice: the Holocaust, the British Empire and the attack on Malala Yousafzai are read not as detours from progress but as what an indifferent world does when nobody stops it. Against that, the essay sets two ideas from the sciences — entropy and scale dependence — to argue that order and fairness are not the default state of anything.

Its conclusion is not despair. Justice is real, but it is authored: a fiction in the sense that people write it, defend it and can let it lapse. The moral universe does not bend on its own. Someone has to bend it.

Form

1,964 words, Chicago endnotes

Field

100,227 entries from 183 countries; shortlisted, then commended at the award ceremony, Oxford, October 2026

Eight Words for Water

India is building language models for communities whose languages have never been written into a machine. The essay argues that this is worth doing and that it is, so far, repeating an old pattern: outsiders choosing which version of a language gets recorded, and speakers discovering afterwards how their words were used.

Two problems are traced. Consent — recordings made for preservation are now training national models. Standardisation — once a model settles on one regional variant, that variant becomes the canonical form and every other becomes a dialect. The essay sets against this the case that imperfect inclusion beats exclusion, and points to Te Hiku Media in Aotearoa as proof that consent-based collection is possible, if slower.

Form

About 1,100 words, journalism register

Outcome

Finalist; defended in a ten-minute oral examination before a senior staff writer; awarded Silver

Recruitment and Rupture

In 1947 India and Pakistan inherited the same army, the same officer culture and the same recruiting doctrine — the colonial belief that some communities were born to soldier. By 1958 one country was still a democracy and the other had just had its first coup. The paper asks how far that divergence can be traced to the way each state handled the one inheritance, through a structured comparison of recruitment patterns, the ethnic make-up of the ranks, and the political reach of the officer corps.

Form

About 5,200 words, two data tables

Mentor

Dr Ida Danewid, through the Indigo Research programme

Outcome

Presented at the IRIS Conference, 2026; under review at the International Journal of High School Research

The Battle They Did Not Choose

Four officers of three services were asked, in recorded interviews, for the one story they would most want remembered. None chose a war. They chose a father asking the army to expel his son, a coma far from any road, a sixteen-year-old alone with eighty rupees, and a dead mentor's advice. The essay treats those choices as historical evidence and argues that the Chetwode Code — the inherited British motto about the safety, honour and welfare of the country, the men, and oneself, in that order — sits at the centre of the Indian officer's self-image, and helps explain why an army built by an empire stayed out of politics after it.

Silences in the interviews are read through Passerini and Portelli; the code is set against Cohen and Wilkinson on civil–military relations.

Form

3,958 words including footnotes

Sources

Four published interviews from The Living Epics Project

On the end of imperialism

The familiar picture — flags lowered, administrators sailing home — answers the question too quickly. The essay goes back to the Latin root, imperium, command, and to the word "especially" in a standard definition of empire, to argue that historians test for the end of empire with too narrow an instrument. Formal territorial rule was delegitimised between the League of Nations and the UN Charter and dismantled between 1945 and 1960; command over other states' choices did not end, it changed form, and the Cold War's proxy and client states are the evidence.

Form

Competition essay