Many congratulations to Florence (Year 2) and Tara (Year 5) who are both winners of their year group categories (Years 1-2/Years 5-6) in the recent GDST Creative Writing competition.
The theme for this year’s GDST Creative Writing Competition was ‘Belonging’ and the entries were judged by Rachel Hore, an alumna of Sutton High School.
Rachel Hore attended Sutton High School between 1970 and 1978, after which she read Modern History at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. For many years she enjoyed a career as an editor for HarperCollins in London before moving with her family to Norwich, where she started to write fiction and taught publishing and creative writing part-time at the University of East Anglia.
Rachel is now a full-time writer, the author of eleven novels, many of them Sunday Times Top Ten bestsellers. A Place of Secrets and Last Letter Home were each selected by Richard and Judy for their Book club in association with WH Smith. The Glass Painter’s Daughter (2009) was shortlisted for the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Romantic Novel of the Year. A Gathering Storm (2011) was shortlisted for their Historical Novel of the Year. Her new novel, A Beautiful Spy, based on a real-life story of a 1930s female spy, was published in February 2021.
Rachel commented:
“I enjoyed reading the GDST students’ creative writing and was very impressed by the overall high standard, especially given that it has been a stressful year for everybody. The theme of ‘belonging’ engendered a high number of pieces about migrants and also the subject of bullying. The experience of being lost and found featured in work by the youngest age groups, amongst whom the feeling of not belonging was also often expressed using the metaphor of toys or plants or inanimate objects. I was pleased to see several poems and also some creative non-fiction.
“A big thank you to all entrants – you gave me a great deal of pleasure through your writing and keep at it! Many congratulations to the winners of each group and those that I’ve highly commended.”