Competitions and Writing:

Oxford French Flash-Fiction Poem A competition challenging secondary school students to write an original piece in French under a strict 100 word limit. Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s signature themes of isolation and immortality and Paul Verlaine’s lyrical style, I wrote this poem as a tribute to both great poets by interweaving their styles and themes into a new work.

Minds Underground Essay The Minds Underground Essay Competition is an academic contest challenging students to write structured critical essays addressing complex literary and philosophical questions. In the Languages category, I selected Question 3, “Is literature more powerful when it crosses borders or when it stays rooted in one language and culture?” After my mum attended Eline Arbo’s stage adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s The Years and she told me someone fainted during the back street abortion scene, I investigated the incident and discovered it was far from an isolated occurrence. This led to me to read the Nobel Prize winning author’s work and therefore examine how cross border adaptations provoke contrasting cultural reactions.

Roméo kiffe Juliette – Stephen Spender Prize The Stephen Spender Prize is an international poetry translation competition challenging participants to translate a poem from any language into English alongside a detailed commentary explaining their translation choices. My entry features a translation of Grand Corps Malade’s slam poem Roméo kiffe Juliette, accompanied by a commentary on how I preserved its spoken word rhythm and slang as he adapted Shakespeare’s star-crossed narrative to the Parisian banlieues, where religious differences replace traditional family rivalries.

Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators The Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators is a UK-wide competition hosted by Oxford University’s Queen’s College Translation Exchange that encourages secondary school students to develop creative translation skills by rendering literature into English. For this year’s Sixth Form competition, the set text was an extract from Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, challenging me to translate a scene where the narrator speaks to his grandmother on the telephone and reflects on the eeriness of hearing a loved one’s voice separated from their body.