Lucky you stockpiled all those pens

I’m kidding. No one writes with pens anymore, do they? Most of my young writers write on their phones! Can’t imagine how.

Anyway, here’s some new creative writing opportunities to keep your thumbs fit:

The Foyle Young Poets of the Year award is open for entries until 31^st July. You have to be 11-17 to enter.

They’re also keen to contact previous winners and highly commended poets to interview them for a research project so if you know any, send them to the website.

Lidl Northern Ireland have launched #MyLidlStory – a 200 word story competition for 5-14 year olds. The story has to begin with the words ‘One day in Lidl…’

This will be judged by Roddy Doyle, no less, and the winner in each age category wins a £250 Lidl voucher (think of the chocolate!) AND a creative writing masterclass hosted by Roddy Doyle and Fighting Words AND a signed copy of Roddy’s book. Entries have to be in by 31^st May.

Generation Lockdown is open for entries from 7-17 year olds until 17^th July. They want to know about your life in lockdown, in the form of stories, personal experience or poems. This is for writers aged 7-17 and should be 700 words or less and will be judged by a group of published authors. Winners will be published in a book as well as winning a prize and you get to go to the book launch and meet the judges! All money raised from the book will go to the BookTrust charity.

Our Corona Diary is creating an archive of young people’s experiences during lockdown by collecting their diaries. They also hope to publish some of them in an anthology so if you’d like to contribute, just start a diary. They stress that a diary doesn’t have to be written. It can be drawn, painted, photographed, filmed, recorded, sung, sculpted, knitted or a combination of all of these!

They’re also collecting on Instagram (@ourcoronadiarygram) and Twitter (@OurCoronaDiary)

So loads to be getting on with there. And if you know a young writer who’d like to share their work, I’m happy to do that here on The Blank Page, just send it to me. While I think it’s perfectly OK to write just for yourself and never show it to anyone or enter competitions, for some people it can be a real confidence boost to put their work out there so it’s great to have all these opportunities!