Many creative outlets have been impeded in 2020 however Richard Huish College challenged their talented students and the gifted Year 9-11 pupils from local schools to use ‘lockdown’ as an inspiration – setting it as the theme for their 25th Original Writing and Illustration Awards.
The Awards, now made up of four competitions, take place in November every year but little did anyone know when the theme was chosen in April that we would be back in lockdown for the ceremony causing the event to be hosted virtually for the first time. A virtual ceremony film was posted on the College website on the evening of 25th November, revealing the prize winners, sharing extracts from the top written entries and displaying a show reel of the artwork submissions. To watch the ceremony visit https://www.huish.ac.uk/about-huish/original-writing-and-illustration-awards/.
The Brunner Cup, dating back to the nineties, is a writing competition now specifically run for partner schools. Entrants were tasked with writing an imaginative original short story, dramatic monologue, play script or poem, of their interpretation of Lockdown. The Taunton Academy, Bishop Fox’s School and Heathfield Community School all had pupils feature in the competitions top shortlisted entries. The Huish English department judged the Brunner competition and were impressed by the calibre and quantity of entries, awarding the 25th Brunner Cup to Lara Hill from The Taunton Academy for her entry ‘A story of a lockdown, before and after’.
Huish students also got expressive entering their work into the exclusive Ross Paterson Creative Writing Award, offered by the trustees of the charity Get Home Safe. Get Home Safe was set up by Helen Evans and her friend Charlotte Pitman, in memory of Helen’s nephew Ross Paterson, a former Huish student with a flair for creative writing. The charity selected James Morrell as this year’s winner of their £100 prize for his Lockdown tale about a young photographer transported from 1964 to 2020.
The Lucas Cup for Artistic Writing challenged students to create a Lockdown based illustration for a poster, either hand drawn or digitally rendered. Judge Tjark Schoenfeld, Course Manager for Graphic Design, awarded this year’s prize to Huish’s Rachel Ng, with Tabetha Curtis from Heathfield Community School swooping first prize in the partner schools’ section with her striking design.
Joseph Bennett, Assistant Principal commented ‘The creative writing and artistic flair across our partner schools and colleges is impressively high. We marvel at the creativity, variety and sheer craftsmanship of the entries we get. We have been delighted this year to still be able to run the competitions and feel revitalised by seeing just what our young people can achieve”.
Past entries of the Original Writing and Illustration Awards have now been published in the College’s Create Magazine. For the latest edition of Create Magazine please email marketing@richuish.ac.uk. To watch the 2020 virtual ceremony and view all this year’s entries please visit https://www.huish.ac.uk/about-huish/original-writing-and-illustration-awards/.