Year 8 Laurie: fiction writer of the year!

Year 8 Laurie, who writes for UGS Perspectives School Magazine, yesterday, along with Year 10 Tom and UGS Literacy Co-ordinator and English teacher Miss Hammond (who leads and works with them), represented the Perspectives team when they attended the Shine School Media Awards Gala ceremony in London, to which they had been invited after entering their team work into its competition and having been short-listed for the Finals.

The annual competition recognises and rewards writing and reporting talent among students from schools across the UK who work on school magazines, newspapers or multimedia projects.

Perspectives were in competition with young writers and reporters from 40 other schools, and they were thrilled when the results came in and Laurie was awarded this outstanding accolade for his poem Oriental Sunset!

We are all incredibly proud of Laurie and the team and cannot wait to see what their writing future holds!

Well Done all and huge thanks to Miss Hammond for inspiring the team.

Please see Laurie's award-winning poem below, followed by a link to Perspectives:

Oriental Sunset 

Oriental sunset

4 in the morning, I’m the last one in this foxhole awake.

 These pits and pools of crimson water                                                   

Are refuge for blind tunnelers and uncle Sam.

Planes whirr above and leave a trail

Of bleached smog in the dark sky,

And I can hear the captain scream and beam the destinies,

Of fateful deserters,

through a revolvers barrel.

Blind like moles men scamper across the twilit land,

Under a pacific sunrise.

A man lies dead beneath my feet,

His mouth padded with cotton.

His voice is the loudest of us all.

A man creeps closer,

And he is too far to be American.

A shell strikes the stripped land,

And ends the deathly silence,

But our captain is to tangled with his golden revolver To be warned of the Japanese beast creeping

 and beating the drums of horror Closer and closer to the foxhole.

Me and another fated soldier fix blunt bayonets to jammed rifles,

And prepare for ghouls from Kyoto to plunge into our dreams and rip out revenge on our atrocities.

Flags wave in the wind of midsummer over our fallen angels,

But I am no man of faith, although I pray,

God will be with you in a cruel death under the oriental sunrise.

UGS Perspectives – Welcome to Urmston Grammar School's student magazine! (wordpress.com)