Six years of wild words and inspired stories
The Young Wild Writer competition is entering its sixth year and going from strength to strength. It’s now a firm fixture in the Hen Harrier Action diary. It has received thousands of entries from young people across the UK – with pieces of writing relating to specific themes about nature and wildlife. The competition has given many young people a voice to inspire others, raise awareness of issues and bring about change to help protect wildlife and wild places.
Hen Harrier Action is a charity that raises awareness of the problem for nature in our uplands. It promotes annual Hen Harrier Days around the UK and online. The hen harrier is a symbol of the change we need to see, as the hen harrier is one of the most persecuted birds of prey illegally killed by gamekeepers on driven grouse moors.
I founded the Young Wild Writer Competition in 2020 when I became a trustee of Hen Harrier Action during the Covid-19 pandemic, when forced isolation inspired us to find new ways to connect and continue to campaign. However, my connection with my hen harriers goes back some years before when I read a book that opened my eyes to the destruction on landscape scale of our uplands. Dr Mark Avery’s book Inglorious gives a detailed but highly readable account of the history and issues associated with driven grouse shooting. It inspired me to write Sky Dancer – a story about a gamekeeper’s son who witnesses his brother shoot a hen harrier, and also Eagle Warrior – set in Scotland about eagle persecution on driven grouse moors.
When Covid-19 closed schools, and young people were educated from home, I wanted to find a way to connect with readers and continue to raise awareness of issues affecting nature. It presented an opportunity to ask young people to look outside their window, to their garden and take time to notice the nature around them, whether they lived in a tower block, a town or in the countryside. Connecting with nature and being aware of what we have around us is vital to ensure we care enough to protect it. As individuals we can feel helpless seeing images of orangutans facing deforestation, but we can become involved directly in our own home area. As a writer and campaigner, I have witnessed how powerful writing has the ability change hearts and minds. Founding the Young Wild Writer Competition with Hen Harrier Action, helped to engage young people with the problems facing nature in the uplands and also gave them the opportunity to use their voices to tell of their concerns about the climate and biodiversity crisis in their areas and globally too.
Each year, we have been blown away by the high standard and variation of entries. Some pieces of writing have inspired change; Neha Narne’s beautiful poem My Patch of Green in the Urban Jungle helped to campaign to save urban community allotments. In 2022, Emily Hunt, won the competition with an astonishing poem about jackdaws, and she continues to use poetry to inspire and campaign for wildlife. In 2023 she became Young Poet Laurate for Warwickshire and a counsellor for Reserva : The Youth Land Trust. Last year, a group of classmates jointly won for entries that were from the perspective of Scottish wildcats writing to an MP to protect their habitats.
Because of the high standard of writing across the age groups, the competition is very difficult to judge with so many worthy winners. The competition limits the piece of writing to 500 words to relate to the specific nature theme given each year. The piece of writing can be poetry, non-fiction, prose, short story – any form of writing. Ultimately, we are looking for originality and the way the writing engages the reader to care, to be curious and to think.
Each year the Young Wild Writer Competition receives brilliant entries, in various forms of writing and across a whole range of topics. This year has been no exception. We desperately need these new voices. In a world where increasing AI can steal, scan and copy content on the internet to create a homogenous alphabet soup of words, there is the need for true human originality and insight to put the human heart and soul into this artform. In doing so, it will help us connect with each other – change hearts and minds – and maybe, just maybe, we change the world.
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Many thanks to Gill for sharing information about this wonderful competition. There is plenty of time left for schools to enter so let your budding authors know!
