For the past five years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Manchester’s hidden gem The Portico Library as a workshop facilitator for their annual Sadie Massey Awards. This free to enter writing and book review competition is open to all schools and young people aged 7 – 18 and is a fantastic opportunity to encourage reading and writing for pleasure. There’s even a special arm of the Portico’s outreach programme dedicated to supporting pupil referral units and schools and departments with special educational needs to enter.
You’ll find full details on the Portico website along with a range of short creative writing video tutorials by the Portico’s author educators. Here’s a short video I recently created to support the book review strand of the competition.
You can also book a specially designed creative writing workshop with one of the Portico’s author educators. I love delivering my fun fairy tale and folklore mashup, where inspired by fairy tales and legends from the Portico collection, children create their own magical characters and write the opening to a fun fantastical story set in the North. I also leave schools with plotting and editing resources which will help them complete their stories ready to enter the Portico Sadie Massey Awards.
You don’t need to book a workshop to enter the competiton though – just an interest in writing and reading. I really hope you decide to enter. Good luck!
Marie Basting 