For one week every year, a group of Swindon librarians band together to run a literary project for their secondary school pupils.
The Swindon Youth Festival of Literature is into its 15th year and 2022’s edition kicked off to a great response on Monday, November 14.
Kate Murphy, 51, is the librarian at Dorcan Academy as well as the coordinator of the festival and has been involved with the event for five years.
“The creativity that comes out of it is incredible. In a single week, students see that authors are not just names on a page but real people, who make a living from writing,” she said.
“They are very inspirational. It’s the reason we all keep doing it!”
Throughout the festival week, students will work with authors, poets and illustrators who visit the schools for performances and workshops.
The first day of this year’s event, which was Monday, November 14, featured the author of the ‘Football Heroes’ series, Matt Oldfield.
“Matt kicked the Festival off with a high energy lively performance at the Wyvern on Monday with 600 Swindon students in the audience,” said Kate.
This year’s line-up includes Carnegie winner Anthony McGowan, Ali Sparkes, Steve Cole, Gareth P Jones, Ele Fountain, Lucy Strange, Helen Dennis, Christopher Edge, Tom Pollock, Kita Mitchell, Chris Vick and Kereen Getten.
The Festival is funded by the Swindon Association of Secondary Heads (SASH) and to date, over 100,000 students have been involved with the festival in some way or another.
The festival also has four business sponsors: WHSmith, Browns Books For Students, local law firm Bower & Bailey Solicitors and local indie bookshop Bert’s Books.
“Alex who owns Bert’s was once a student librarian at Dorcan Academy when the festival’s founder Fiona Hardcastle was the librarian there,” revealed Kate.
“We are so grateful to our sponsors and SASH for funding this important creative project with all the events being free for students.”
There will also be three competitions held to test the literary skills of Swindon’s secondary school students.
The first is a creative writing competition, with a picture provided to inspire a 500-word story.
The second is an illustration competition judged by Swindon Patron of Libraries Steve Antony. Students can use any artistic medium in two dimensions to illustrate a selected passage from the Carnegie-winning book ‘October, October’ by Katya Balen.
The third competition is for poetry, on the topic of climate, which will be judged by Ash Dickinson.
“We are a lovely team who work very hard to bring the festival to the students of Swindon,” concluded Kate.
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