Swindon Youth Festival of Literature celebrates tenth year

The Swindon Youth Festival of Literature runs from November 6 to November 10 to celebrate Swindon's local and creative talent.

Swindon Youth Festival of Literature celebrates reading, writing and creativity and is a collaborative project, jointly co-ordinated by the Librarians of the eleven secondary school across Swindon.

2017 sees the tenth anniversary of the Swindon Youth Festival of Literature (SYFL). From modest beginnings, this well respected annual event has grown year on year, nurtured by our passion for books and reading. The festival has attracted so many wonderful and diverse authors and performers, which has highly anticipated what year ten has to bring.

The festival kicked off this year’s events yesterday with the Inter-school Book Quiz at The Dorcan Academy. This is always a highly competitive event between the eleven schools. Last year’s winners, Highworth Warneford School, will be keen to retain the title in 2017 but who will challenge them to the trophy? It is all to play for.

The headline event for all schools will take place at the Wyvern Theatre on Tuesday 7 November with award winning fantasy fiction author Jonathan Stroud. Jonathan is the author of the New York Times best selling trilogy Bartimaeus and the Lockwood and Co series. Lockwood and Co is a fantastic supernatural series about a horrifying epidemic of ghosts in London where a trio of detectives investigate some of the spookiest and deadliest hauntings. Ghosts and ghouls beware.

During the week, performance poet Ash Dickinson will return to Swindon to visit each of the eleven secondary schools to perform his poetry to all Year 7 students, encouraging their “inner poet” by supporting them to create their own rhymes and verse. Each school will also host workshops and interactive talks from their chosen authors throughout the week. They will also host transition events featuring the best in KS2 authors and writers for students from their partner primary schools in Years 5 and/or 6. These sessions incorporate even more of Swindon’s student population into the exciting world of reading, writing and creativity supported and celebrated by the Swindon Youth Festival of Literature.

The Festival programme also includes the following cross-school activities to contribute to the week-long celebration:

Creative Writing Competition – 500 words story inspired by an image.
Illustration Competition – Creation of illustrations from a section of text from the Carnegie 2017 winning title.

The SYFL is funded by the Swindon Association of Secondary Heads (SASH). This year the additional sponsorship of prizes has been supported by Bower and Bailey, Browns Books for Students and WH Smith.

Dave Cousins, of the event, said: “Such a great opportunity for students to meet and work with writers, poets and artists. Every town should have one."