Woodbridge Young Poets Competition 2016
Young poets across Suffolk were celebrated at the inaugural Woodbridge Young Poets Competition. After attracting over 450 entries in its first year, the competition ended with a special prize-giving event held for 24 young winners at The Seckford Theatre on Wednesday.
The overall competition winner in the junior category (ages 7-11) was Chloe Morgan at The Abbey, Woodbridge School, who wrote a thoughtful poem ‘The Power of the Sea’. Junior runner-up was Aurelia Hibbert, also from The Abbey, who wrote the poem ‘Firework’. Abbey pupils were particularly successful in the Junior section of the competition, with Beatrice Liddy receiving a highly commended award for her poem ‘The Secret’, whilst Alex Crawford won a commended award for his poem ‘Orchestra’, and Alice Sharratt was also commended for her poem ‘In My Mind’. Woodbridge Senior School pupil Lucy Hobday also won a highly commended award for her poem ‘I Should Like, written whilst she was a pupil at Kyson Primary School.
Woodbridge Pupils also featured In the senior section of the competition, with Alfie Davis winning a highly commended award for his poem The Girl at the Window’, whilst Lia Schreiber, Madeleine Cheshire and Sam Bryant all won commended awards for their poems ‘Your Ability to Trust’, ‘Love’ and ‘I Don’t Want It’. The senior section winner and runner up were Archie Gault and Beth Cope from One Sixth Form College.
The judges Ian Griffiths, former Chairman of the Suffolk Poetry Society and Fred Ellis of Poetry Anglia were delighted by the outstanding quality of all of the entries to the competition – indeed describing their task as exceptionally difficult. All 24 winning entries were warmly introduced by Fred and Ian who detailed the powerful reasons why they had won, and when the poems were read aloud by their authors, the fantastic quality of the winners was truly revealed. You could have heard a pin drop in the audience as we delighted in the excellence of the work, on themes happy to sad, light and dark, but all wonderful.
Our huge thanks to Fred and Ian for the amazing amount of work and thought they put into both judging the entries and presenting the winners on the day, and our even bigger thanks and congratulations to the winning poets. Well done!
