As part of the activities spinning out from the University’s partnership with the BBC and First Story on the short story awards, for the first year First Story held its Young Writers’ Festival on the Sidgwick Campus at Cambridge, on 25th September 2018. On the day, we welcomed 330 students between the ages of 11 and 17 from 19 schools across the East Midlands, London, Lancashire and East and West Yorkshire. The day was supported by more than 40 teachers, 26 writers and 25 volunteers. It was a packed programme, including 42 intensive creative writing workshops which ran throughout the day, led by 23 acclaimed writers including poets, playwrights and novelists. By the end of it, over 740 pieces of creative writing had been produced by students, teachers, and volunteers. More than 320 books were also bought by students and taken back across the country to new homes.
It was an absolute pleasure to see the campus I walked onto in 1995 for my first lecture as an undergraduate, terrified and bewildered at the new world I’d just been deposited in by my parents, buzzing with young people full of creativity, enthusiasm and a real sense of ownership of the space. I had fun chairing the plenary session with writers, Kei Miller, Shivanee Ramlochan, and Stephen Kelman, and attempting to field the many questions we were inundated with from an overwhelmingly engaged audience. The highlight though was the final session in which pupils took over the stage in the Lady Mitchell Hall and delivered the writing they’d created during the day – it was a deeply moving and powerful experience, and sometimes a very funny one, and was proof, if ever it’s needed, of the power and importance of creative writing as a way for young people to process their experiences of the world.