Poetry Prize

Congratulations to our winner of the Year 7 to 9 category in the GDST Laurie Magnus Poetry competition.

For her poem, Bug Church, Asantewaa in Year 9 drew on her experience as a member of lunchtime bug club. Her work was inspired by Chinua Achebe’s poem, Vulture, which Year 9 pupils studied in class before writing poetry using animals as a metaphor for a bigger idea.

This year’s national poetry competition was judged by GDST alumna Claudia Daventry, a prize-winning poet and author, who selected Asantewaa’s poem as the winner of the Year 7 to 9 category.  Claudia commented: “What a lot of amazing poems this year… I’ve had such a challenging task – and fun – reading them. There was overall so much inventiveness, so many striking images… Ultimately I went for the ‘outlier’ – Bug Church – because it was such a standout poem. I loved the lack of emotion as the speaker squashes a bug then expands the discussion to include god and reflects on how bad a person she must be. The lower-case ‘i’ is strangely appropriate. The poem is just the right side of anarchic: it’s unexpected, it has exaggerated perspectives, it’s a little bit mean, it’s funny – it might just be flippant, and yet either way it has a serious message underlying the text. It’s never wrong to be entertaining, and this poem does it really well.” 

The Laurie Magnus Poetry Prize is one of the GDST’s longest-running prizes, established in memory of Sir Laurie Magnus, by his widow. Laurie Magnus was a GDST Council member from 1907, and Chairman from 1929 until his death in 1933. The competition encourages students with an active interest in poetry to put pen to paper, with prizes and book vouchers awarded for the most original submissions.