Winners of Bury St Edmunds Literature Festival 2024 creative writing competition revealed
After an unprecedented number of entries, the winners and runners-up for this year’s Bury St Edmunds Literature Festival creative writing competition have been chosen.
This year, entrants were asked to write a creative response to the prompt ‘beyond my front door’.
Emma Shercliff, literary agent at Laxfield Literary Agency, who judged the entries of the adults 18-plus category, said: “I greatly enjoyed judging the prize and reading such a wide variety of responses to the prompt. This fabulous theme was explored literally and metaphorically by the writers, on themes ranging from illness, caring and grief to joy and celebration.
“There were some very accomplished pieces and the poetry entries were particularly strong. Many of the stories made me want to know more about the characters and their motivations and could be expanded into longer form. There is clearly a lot of creative writing talent in Bury.”
Competition organisers said judging was not an easy task.
Emma was joined by National Writer’s Centre chief executive Peggy Hughes, who judged the children’s categories, and Bury Literature Festival honorary patron, author Nicola Upson, who judged the young people 13-17 category. She said: “It wasn’t an easy choice, but these two stood out for me and I adored the fact they were so different.”
All of the winners and runners up receive tickets to the festival, where they will be presented with goody bags full of books and for the adults a few treats donated by Butterworths Coffee, Edmunds Cocktails and Greene King.
In addition, the winners of the adult and young person’s categories will win one-to-one mentoring sessions with Bury-based author Kate Sawyer, while the children’s winners have won a bespoke event for their schools.
Award-winning author and illustrator duo Kiran Millwood-Hargrave and Tom de Freston will be visiting Abbots Green Academy and King Edward VI School before the festival to give talks about their best-selling novels Julie and the Shark and Leila and the Blue Fox, which focus on ecology and mental wellbeing.
Festival organisers said they were delighted with the number of children who got involved with this year’s competition and with the opportunity to connect with schools to provide this prize.
Although the school visits are limited to the winners, there are still some tickets available to see Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Tom de Freston talk at this year’s festival.
Tickets for all children’s events, with Catherine Emmett, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Catherine Emmett and Dominique Valente, are pay what you can, while under 18s go free to all events to help make the festival accessible to all children and their grown-ups.
Book festival tickets now at https://www.burylitfest.co.uk/
Winners and runners up
Children age five-10 category winner: Zachary Spriggs, 10, Abbots Green Primary Academy; runner up Finn Wolfarth Shea, six, Castle Newnham School
Zachary said: “I love to be creative and imaginative with writing and literature. I love thinking of new ideas for books or poems for school. English is an inspiring lesson to open up to new vocabulary and has a massive array of possibilities.
“Winning means a lot and I am extremely proud of myself. However, if everyone did their best and did not give up, then they are all winners in a way.”
Peggy Hughes, judge, said: “This poem made me smile so hard and keeps giving me a different view on trees and a new image or idea to admire each time I read it.
“It also articulates my own feelings about trees, so the personal feeling of the poet becomes a shared one in the reader – all of which is the marker of a very fine poem.”
Trees, leaves and in between, by Zachary Spriggs
Don’t you love
The trees up above
They whisper and chatter just like humans
They have leaves and in between is the most exciting part
Don’t you love
The scene of the blue, comforting sky,
The rough bark as if the churning, hurling sea turned solid
The look of the leaves
An even deeper green than a shard of the most frequently polished malachite
Don’t you love
The radiant, scorching sun
The noise of rushing animals as if they were late to a meeting
The sense you get as you ponder on through your walk and stop yourself to admire a tree as if it were a celebrity
Don’t you love
The towering, lovely trees that give us fresh air
So remember as you go for a nice sunset stroll
Remember to admire the trees, leaves and in between.
Children age 11-13 category winner: Joseph Spriggs, 12, King Edward VI School; runner up, Suzie Francis, 13, St Benedict’s School
Joseph said: “I am delighted. This is one of the first competitions I have entered my writing into and to win makes it even more wonderful. I enjoy nature writing as it helps us to connect with nature, especially with global warming and climate change becoming an increasingly more urgent issue.”
Judge Peggy Hughes said: “This sweet, seemingly simple little lullaby is underpinned by a really impressive technical ability and control of rhyme and rhythm, giving it a lovely musical quality.”
Finch’s Lullaby, by Joseph Spriggs
Come, little fledgling, hatch from your egg
Curled up inside, all beak, wing, and leg
Soon you will enter the mossy wooden cell
But for now you remain in the safety of your shell
Come, little fledgling, find your feet
Your mother and father will help you to eat
Soon you will leave the door of the nest
But for now, little fledgling, you need to rest
Come, little fledgling, learn to sing
On house and tree let your notes ring
Soon you will leave through the darkening door
But for now, little fledgling, tweet, chirp and caw
Come, little fledgling, dance through the night
Past sleepy windows, out of sight
Soon you will find yourself behind locked doors
But for now, little fledgling, avoid death’s claws
So, come, little fledgling, hatch from your egg
Enter this world and its joys I beg
Soon you will discover the wonders of life
But for now little fledgling remain far from strife
Young people age 14-17 category winner: Isadora Edwards, 15; runner up, Josephine Bingley, 17, Thurston Community College Sixth Form
Isadora said: “I am so happy I can do and be appreciated for what I love doing the most: writing and telling stories. I cannot wait for the future, of sharing more stories and ideas and to listen to new ones.”
Nicola Upson, judge, said: “I loved the exuberance of the storytelling here. The author has such a natural, engaging voice and I was instantly drawn into the story and carried along by the sheer energy and imagination of the narrative.”
This is the Hife! by Isadora Edwards
My home was ordinary. I had a TV, a bedroom to share, a purple sofa. A little garden. My brother and I shared a Ps3.
Then, you open the front door. Beyond my front door, everything is utterly out of the ordinary.
I lived on Hife Street, an obscure enough beginning for any kid’s life. It was home to the world’s biggest hife community. A Hife was an intelligent species. They were native to my country, Brimars. Just like humans. Kind of. I figured that most humans didn’t eat acorns, nor were their noses abnormally large, with stubby limbs. But because human and hife were like-minded, they always worked hand in hand (or rather nub, in a hife’s case).
I’d lived on Hife Street since 2004, when I was five. We were the human family on Hife Street. In the story I am writing for you right now, I was 10.
Next door lived the ‘fun outing’ hife. Every hife in the community had a title. Hifes were a species who believed in solidarity and family. The fun outing hife was young and fun. His job was to babysit the local children, take them on outings and keep them out of trouble. One afternoon, he took Dino, my brother, and I out somewhere fun. As you can probably infer, this is where our story begins.
My Mother had gone over the usual rules: “And remember George, please keep your brother out of trouble!”
She set off in her Peugeot.
The Hife took us to the soft play where, rather embarrassingly, neither Dino nor I had visited before. The Hife got some coffee, and Dino raced off, on to the climbing frame, me following not far behind.
We climbed high. I found this fun, yet exhausting. We passed slides and ladders and the sort, before finding the entrance to a tunnel slide at the top level. I saw, from a certain angle, that it would land in a large ball pit, after looping around the climbing frame. I could also see, from the very top of the frame, the Fun Outing Hife, just a blob at a table.
Dino shot off, right into the slide, followed by roughly 11 other children. I climbed in too.
The slide was a little too confined for my liking, but for a while it was quiet. The ride was almost never-ending. Entrance, after entrance, twisting in all different directions, fast, slow. But as I got closer to the ending, I heard sounds of despair.
A large hife, seemingly made of wood, sat in the middle of the ball pit, chuckling. He held a child in each of his 10 arms, the last of the 12 making their sweet escapes out of the pit. Dino was in the hife’s highest left hand, yelling, kicking. Despite the shrieks, the adults in the seating area seemed unfazed.
I climbed on to the end of the slide and launched myself at the hife, crashing into his broad, wooden chest. From the probable shock, and the weight of a 10-year-old child, launched at high speed, he fell backwards and lay hopelessly in the pit, the children escaping his evil clutches and darting through the exit. As Dino and I turned to leave too, the tyrant sprung back into action.
“You little rats!” The next thing I knew, I was spinning around, seven feet in the air…
“Hoo-doo-doo-doo-doo!” sang another hife, our hife, as he shot out of the slide like a flash. The bad hife yelped and Dino and I fell.
“Fun Outing Hife?” we gasped in unison. “Quickly!” he replied, and the three of us scrambled out of the ball pit.
The Fun Outing Hife ran, as fast as his little feet could carry him. Under the slide, something was glowing.
“Get on a star!” The hife panted. “You what?” I cried. “The star!” he repeated, impatiently, “Get on! Please!”
Dino mounted the smallest, and I got on to the medium.
“Kids! We need to see her! Dotty! Dotty the witch! She’ll know what to do!”
And as the stars headed off at high speed, Dino and I both knew we weren’t to question a thing.
Adults 18-plus winner: Beatrix Locke; runner-up, Aruna Stannard
Beatrix said: “As a Suffolk-born writer, it means a lot to be recognised by a local competition and feel part of its literary culture. The Front Back Door came out of long wrestling with the prompt; I was determined to try something different with it, so it's gratifying to hear the story has been rewarded on this merit. All my thanks.”
Emma Shercliff, literary agent and judge, said: “I loved this piece; it was a real stand-out for me.
“This was perhaps the most imaginative and creative response to the prompt, with the front door being used both as an intriguing, tangible object and to symbolise protection and loss.”
The Front Back Door, by Beatrix Locke
On Saturday afternoon, my older brother Jacko removed each of the screws. One by one, and took the front door off its hinges. The raw threshold exposed us to the street and Mum said that wouldn’t do at all. So, Jacko did the same to the back door and put that one up in its place, closing us off again.
We lived in a terrace with a rectangular back garden: four-sides fenced and neighboured. The pre-fab extension – grown back and outwards of the house – blocked off the side gate. Even I couldn’t get in that way. Jacko called me ‘Scrambler’ after he found me on the roof of the lean-to; I was coaxing a stray cat, with wiry orange stripes and green eyes, like the tiger in my atlas.
For a while we left the back doorway open, overlooking the narrow patio that stepped down into the long grass. Almost like the veranda of a safari lodge, whispering with a shredded fly screen in savanna heat. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d curl up in the dog bed and keep watch through the empty doorframe. A gamekeeper on the lookout for wild animals.
From there, I could see the front door where Jacko had left it. Flat in the grass, scarred side down. A black shape at night, it was my watering hole, where I’d watch for creatures emerging from the overgrown lawn. Daytime, when light distinguished the panelling and handle, I thought it looked like a doorway underground. Perhaps a lost network of war rooms, or a tunnel out of town. I never went into the garden to try it, walking the adventure in my mind. When Jacko finally moved it, there was only yellow, flattened grass underneath.
He took it into the shed for firewood. Chopped short-ways and split down the grain for kindling. Some of the wood near the bottom was scorched through. I saw how Jacko crumbled off the charcoal bits before he put the sticks in the hearth bucket.
When it was still the front door, the outside was painted red. I could see it coming along the street on my way home from school: pursed lips in the symmetrical face. Our dad had painted it when they moved in as newlyweds, because it was his new wife’s favourite colour. Red like her wind-flushed cheeks, or the pansies that self-seeded the window boxes of her mother’s house. Like her kiss.
Not like the cherry-red glow of coals, or the heart of a target. Not then.
I heard her tell Jacko that she never wanted to see him walk with a limp. I thought it was an odd thing to say. Jacko was lithe and dark at 18, covertly strong in his narrow, tapered limbs and geometrically straight shoulders. He was capable and sure-footed. He wasn’t like Connor Daly across the way, who’d had that accident at the football club and smashed in both his knees.
Jacko told me that Mum said odd things because she was sad about Dad. She had taken to referring to herself as Mrs Detective Sergeant Aswas Asis. Darkly muttering while she watched out of the window. I’d never met Aswas Asis and wondered why Mum had taken his name. I asked Jacko if she was still married.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Now she’s a widow.’ Like the spiders I’d read about; Jacko said yes. Solitary and self-preserving. Who loved us just the same, just not herself anymore.
But it was nothing I should worry about because he would protect me. ‘You watch the back garden,’ he’d say when we played safari. ‘I’ll watch the front.’ My brother in arms.
I thought he gave me the more exciting territory. Volleys of swifts overhead and crackling with insects: my frontier was overgrown, untouched wilderness.
I’d also read about wildfires in my atlas. Uncontrolled flames, spread by the wind through areas of vegetation or wood. Naturally caused in the hottest part of the day. Ignition during the night, except for a lightning strike, usually indicated unnatural causes. Human interference.
I’d hear them when I was awake in bed, too hot to sleep. Balmy through the summer because we kept our windows shut. A moving, murmuring, growling pack. Voices distorted through the glass. When I went downstairs, it was always quiet through the back doorway. Only the whispering fly screen. My peaceful savanna.
One night, Jacko came down too. I was already in the dog bed; I’d told him I slept there sometimes. He was dressed, dark like his hair so his agile body looked bigger, absorbing the gloom. He stood in the hall and put a serious finger to his lips. Then, he went through the front back door, on to the street, and shut it behind him.
