The ISMLA Creative Writing Competition for 2023 is now open.
This competition is open to all of your pupils in Year 7 upwards and they are welcome to enter either in a KS3, GCSE or A Level category. We encourage schools to run this as an in-house competition in the first instance and we will then accept one entry per language and category per school.
Partnership opportunity: ISMLA member schools are welcome to open up the competition to their partner state schools who can submit entries under their own schools’ name – again, one language entry per school per category.
Italian and Russian competitions will be open to ISMLA member schools and to state schools.
The competition
Within each language, there is a choice of three titles. Students must write in the target language and answer the brief as indicated as long as the word count is respected. The challenges for each language can be found here.
(250-350 words, except for Mandarin KS3 – 150 words).
A successful piece of writing will demonstrate the following
- Creativity and imagination.
- Engagement with the target language culture.
- Linguistic ability appropriate to the entrant’s year group. We are not looking for perfection, but entries should be comprehensible and engaging, rather than overly complex or perfectly accurate
Submission
The deadline for submitting entries is Friday 20th October 2023. You can find the submission form here; submissions should be made by email to admin@ismla.co.uk.
Notes:
- As this is a creative writing competition, entries in the form of a discursive essay will not be accepted.
- A teacher is allowed to make some general comments (verbal or written) as feedback to a first draft, up to a maximum of five bullet points, but no further input is permitted.
- Where students engage in research, a list of references at the end is desirable but not necessary.
- We ask schools not to submit work written by native or heritage speakers with significant prior knowledge to this interschool competition, although we hope that native speakers are inspired to get writing and submit an entry for internal review nonetheless.
