Medieval and Modern Languages doctoral student Helen Craske has jointly won the prestigious Naomi Schor Memorial Award presented by the international scholarly society the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association (NCFS), at its annual conference held in late October.

The Association's postgraduate essay competition is held each year in memory of Naomi Schor, the noted literary critic and pioneering feminist theorist.  Helen's paper, entitled 'Selling Scandal: Infamy and Complicity in Rachilde and Lorrain' explored the relationship between two controversial French writers at the turn of the century: Rachilde and Jean Lorrain. She analysed a series of articles in a weekly review called Le Zig-Zag, suggesting that Rachilde and Lorrain used media exchanges as a means of mutual self-promotion.  The essay/paper represents part of Helen's DPhil project on 'Complicity in Fin-de-Siècle Literature', which analyses the conceptualisation of shared crime and guilt in French literary culture at the end of the nineteenth century.

Helen is one of only a few UK-based students to have won the prize; the other joint winner this year being an American PhD student, based at Yale University.