We were delighted that Howell’s students have done extremely well in this year’s Laurie Magnus Poetry Award with Year 9’s Shifa S winning the Year 7-9 category with her poem, A Dragon, A Girl and a Knight. Click here to read Shifa's poem. The poems were judged by Sydenham High School alumna Claudia Daventry. After Sydenham High School Claudia took a year to study French at the Sorbonne in Paris before starting her degree in French and Spanish at Oxford. In 2019 she won the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine and is currently working on a collaborative project focusing on the connection between mental health and sleep, and the protection of the dark sky. In her judge's comments, she said of Shifa's poem:
“Impossible as ever to find a ‘best’, the category this year – for its arch tone and sheer rollocking storyline – had to go to another alternative monster story, Shifa S’s A Dragon, A Girl and a Knight, whose familiar fairytale title belies a no-nonsense alternative outcome where the princess stuck in the tower ‘destined to marry her kingdom’s saviour’ suddenly has an epiphany: ‘but how does a woman marry herself?’ – and (spoiler alert) slays the cowering knight (‘isn’t he a charmer?’), flying off on the back of her own independence, the fierce dragon.
Well done to Shifa.”
Several Howell's students were mentioned in the judge's comments:
Anisha M (Year 2): “ I loved Anisha M’s dinosaur poem, so full of surprises and rhymes.”
Lillybell B (Year 4) “Lillybell B’s nod to William Blake, her Tiger! imagines with empathy the tiger’s hunger if it fails to make a kill.”
Alexandra P (Year 6) “Alexandra P’s eloquent Amazing Amazon Rainforest is destroyed by humans, like ‘a careless rider on a big fiery horse’”
Blythe E (Year 10) “…and others use imagery: in Blythe E’s searching poem Ideas
Paint lined her pockets and words filled her shoes
Her ears full of music and her eyes saw beauty in all
But she was afraid”
Issy L-J (Year 12) “Issy L-J paints an exquisite sound-picture (‘How I wish I could shine, reflect in her mind/The way that she shines, divine in her eyes’) as envy yearns to be the admired in the shape of a narcissus worshipping the sun.)”
Many congratulations to Shifa and to all Howell’s students.