emagazine Close Reading Competition 2023 – The Results!

Winner

• Dia Attilakos, City of London School

Runners-up

• Phoenix Fleming, Marlborough School

• Jack Organ, Christ’s College, Brecon

Click here to download the winning entries and extract from the novel.​

Highly-commended

• Poppy Greville-Collins, Marlborough College
• Mackenzie Gilmore, Portsmouth Grammar School

Commended

• Amani Almasri, Queen’s Gate School
• Eliza Shatokhina, Godolphin and Latymer
• Emma Levin, Highgate School
• Tom Holbrook, Marlborough College
• Piers Fulford-Smith, Marlborough College
• Sophia Radkevitch, Marlborough College

Comments by Barbara Bleiman, co-editor of emagazine

As usual, Lucy Webster and I selected a shortlist of entries to send to our judge, Elleke Boehmer. Though we were pleased to be able to send her 11 excellent candidates, the entry overall this year was a little disappointing in a few respects.

We love seeing entries from a broad spectrum of schools and often in the past the shortlist has included many individual students who have sent in a piece of writing themselves. We love to see that! This year, to our surprise, there were fewer entries overall and from a smaller range of schools.

We noted that it was quite rare to find everything coming together – clarity of expression, literary terms used judiciously and correctly, secure punctuation and phrasing and, most important of all, insightful and well-judged comment on what was most distinctive and interesting about this opening to a novel. We put a high premium on writing that explored the sometimes surprising manner in which the past was dealt with, the contradictions and complexities in the characterisation of the father and his masculinity, the elements of deceptiveness or untrustworthiness in him, and the shocking nature of what happened which the narrator sets up, to be revealed through the novel.

We were delighted with the response of the winner and runners-up – these three students all impressed us with the quality of their thinking about the extract. They understand what it means to do a ‘close reading’ of a text. They are all worthy of high praise for this and we congratulate them on their work.

Congratulations, too, to Poppy and Mackenzie who are highly-commended and to the rest of the shortlist who are all commended.

Winner

• Dia Attilakos, City of London School
  
  For me this was the most insightful of the entries, with its sustained attention to the involvement of the reader in the process of writing. I particularly enjoyed the account of submersion in the past.

Runners Up

• Phoenix Fleming, Marlborough School
  
  I appreciated the clarity and determination of this critic’s approach, and the quality of the writing, which was nicely paced and controlled. The observations on how suspense was built up across the passage, was valuable, too.
• Jack Organ, Christ’s College, Brecon
  
  The writing here is generally sophisticated. There is a greater critical composure here than demonstrated in other shortlisted entries.