Congratulations to Year 9 pupil Catherine who has been highly commended in the 2022 GDST Creative Writing competition. This year, the theme was ‘Bouncing back’ 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.
Rachel commented:
“I have enjoyed reading this year’s entries and the theme of Bouncing Back has proved to be a fertile one. 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. Congratulations to all the winners and thank you so much to all the writers for taking part – there is a wonderful range of talent on display and their work gave me a great deal of pleasure.”
Catherine’s entry called ‘Vigilant Volleyball’ is a dramatic and well paced story about bouncing back in sport.