Creative Writers

Congratulations to our budding authors who triumphed in this year’s GDST Creative Writing Prize.

The annual competition attracts entries from GDST schools across the UK and this year’s theme was ‘bouncing back.’ In the Junior School, Maila in Year 3 won the £50 top prize in the Year 3 & 4 category; Danny’s Whale Adventure was praised for its “vivid descriptive writing and lively voice… a well-structured story of being swallowed by a whale.” Read her winning entry here.

Victoria in Year 1 was runner-up in the Year 1 & 2 category; her story, My Big Dream, was described as “a tenderly written tale of a budding ballerina learning to overcome failure” and commended for its “mature approach to the subject matter.”

Upper Sixth student Penelope was highly commended in the Sixth Form category; her piece, entitled I Have Found A Substitute for Fire, was judged to be a “highly imaginative post-Apocalyptic tale with a strongly evoked setting and beautifully sensuous writing.” 

The competition was judged by Rachel Hore, an alumna of Sutton High School, who read Modern History at Oxford; a former editor for HarperCollins in London, she now is now a best-selling author. Rachel commented: “The standard of work is once more very high. There are many thought-provoking examples from writers engaging with the idea of turning difficult situations around. Whilst younger students found inspiration in the natural world with some wonderfully evoked settings, the older age groups dealt maturely with more challenging, sometimes very dark subject matter… there is a wonderful range of talent on display and their work gave me a great deal of pleasure.”

Many congratulations to our winning writers.