Barton Peveril Student Wins National Young Writers Competition
Barton Peveril Sixth Form College student Abby Butler is a winner of this year’s national Young Writers Competition.
The Young Writers Competition asks 11-18 year old students across the country to enter a thought-provoking piece of poetry. The winning students then have their work published in the competition’s annual anthology.
‘Imagine’
The prompt for this year’s competition was ‘imagine.’ Abby, who was previously a student at The Henry Beaufort School in Winchester, explored this prompt by imagining a world without coronavirus and reminiscing about normal life prior to the pandemic.
The second year student, who has ambitions to study English at university after completing her college studies later this year, first heard about this competition through Subject Leader for English Literature Tom Voaden. Voaden shared details about the competition in the College’s English Extension Q-XTRA activity, where students explore the subject beyond the curriculum, and encouraged students to participate.
“I’m just very happy”
Abby Butler spoke on the competition and her success:
“I’m so glad that Barton always works to give its students opportunities like this where we can express ourselves and our creativity. I’m just very happy to have been a part of it.”
Below is Abby’s winning poem, which will be published in the annual Young Writers anthology.
Soon? Soon.
Let me pitch to you a world
which you might recognise;
no graphs, pie charts or men in suits to sell it to you,
just imagine.
A world where
you have to wear a mask
only to hide your emotions,
pretend you like the gift.
A world where,
‘three’s a crowd’
is nothing more than a social euphemism,
encouraging the intimacy found
in isolation,
not a rule of law.
A world where,
the irresponsibility of a busy beach
refers only to the mother whose son has
disappeared alone
over the dunes to get away from it all,
just the beach.
Can you imagine a world where
we eat out to help out
only ourselves because cooking is too much after
such a long week, month, year…
Are you smiling yet? Longing?
Eyes creasing and glistening?
We can’t see your mouth through the fabric.
This world we can imagine,
because we had it, once.
And we’ll see it again soon,
soon.
