Last Wednesday (12th October 2011) I had the pleasure of attending the award ceremony for the 2011 Litro and IGGY Young Person’s Short Story Competition 2011 held at the 3i offices in London. This is the second year this competition has run, and the prize to the winner was a substantial cheque, and their story published in the Sunday Times and on the London Underground! I don’t envy the job of the judges, who between them had hundreds of entries to get through, but for a less daunting task, the six shortlisted stories are online here. They are all inspirational, but there did of course have to be a winner and it was a young lady by the name of Layla, whose story was entitled “La maison de Dieu”. As part of the ceremony an excerpt of the story was read out by Peter Blegvad a long time collaborator with IGGY, and as always I could spend all night listening to his dulcet tones (in a purely platonic sense, obviously).
The evening was though all about the shortlisted stories, so many congratulations to both the winner, but also to the other writers who made it that far, I’m sure that they will all be very successful at whatever they end up doing in the future and it was only a shame that there couldn’t be more prizes.
For further information the IGGY website can be found here, and the Litro website at http://www.litro.co.uk/.
