The Big Wrap
Year 8 student Lila De Sena with Australian author Tim Winton
at the 2022 Tim Winton Award for Young Writers'
Writing Success
The City of Subiaco’s 2022 Tim Winton Award for Young Writers is a writing award that encourages imagination, innovation and creativity and is open to Western Australian school students across the state. Stories submitted must be an original piece of prose writing of no more than 2000 words.
This year, Year 8 student Lila De Sena’s short story Marigold achieved second place in the Lower Secondary Category (Years 7, 8 and 9). Lila’s entry was a heartfelt and sensitive story from the narrative perspective of a young child, teenager and adult as they work through the varied emotions that emerge whilst watching a parent cope with the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s disease.
Lila received some admirable comments from this year's judges.
"In second place is a piece of writing that really plucks at the heartstrings. The subject matter is handled maturely by pointing out the bittersweet happiness of memories instead of surrendering just to despair. It is a clever, carefully paced and constructed story spanning the ages and emotions. The tight, crisp writing holds the reader in the story with very shrewd insights on display".
You can read Lila's story here.
Recently, Lila was invited to work with the Year 11 ATAR English students to provide them with some strategies and advice as they prepared for the composing section of their Semester 2 English examination. Lila shared ideas on what inspires her to write, the process of drafting and editing, ways to use language to engage the reader and also how to use flashback narrative structure. She also provided instruction on how to use dialogue that is meaningful to a narrative’s purpose. At the end of the presentation, students asked questions around genre and style choices and also offered praise for the quality and sensitivity of Lila’s narrative which for many was surprising, when she was introduced as the author of a recent short story they had used as a template for their own narrative piece.
As one of our new and budding authors on campus, Lila will be working with renowned authors and honing her writing skills for future publication through her enrolment in the Year 9 Emerging Master Writers Class that has been a very popular choice for students for 2023.