Our prizewinners attended the prize-giving yesterday, at the Clifford Chance building in Canary Wharf. The guest judges (authors Helen Dennis and Adam Baron) awarded prizes and certificates. The winning poems and short stories will be published in a book called ‘In this, our city’, and will be fresh from the printers for the autumn term. So, our winners will be published authors!

About the judges:
Helen Dennis is the author of the ‘River of Ink‘ and ‘Secret Breakers‘ series of books. She is a writer of adventure stories set in the real world and which link back to myths and mysteries of the past. Helen led a number of workshops for Tower Hamlets schools during the competition and was the judge for the years 1 – 4 categories and the year 5 and 6 poetry.
Adam Baron is the author of five successful novels including ‘Boy Underwater‘ and ‘You Won’t Believe This‘ and has, in his time, been an actor, comedian, journalist and press officer at Channel 4 television. He now runs the widely respected MA in Creative Writing at Kingston University London. Adam was judge for the Year 5 and 6 Stories and the secondary school stories and poems.  He also came to BGFJ to lead two writing  workshops with Year 5.

Louise's and Alice's Year 4 literacy groups were so lucky to attend FREE events at The Genesis Theatre, as part of the Barnes Literature Festival. 
The first event was with Serena Patel, the author of the 'Anisha, Accidental Detective' series which won the Sainsbury's Children's Book Award for Fiction. Her own family have been the inspiration for lots of the crazy things that happen to Anisha. Serena says that her favourite character to write is Granny Jas, because she's mischievous and ends up getting into all sorts of trouble. She also confessed that the 'evil twins' in the books are based on her own twin brother and sister!
Serena believes all children deserve to feel seen in the stories they read, and that "We need lots of different voices telling stories". She told us to hold on to our Big Dreams, as her childhood ambition was to be a children's author!
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Alice's group enjoyed an entertaining afternoon with the poet, Joshua Seigal. He performed some of his poems, and took lots of questions from the audience. The BGFJ question was, "What would you have been if you hadn't been a poet?" The unexpected answer was, "An elephant!", followed by a brilliant elephant impression! (Really, he'd like to be a food critic, so he could eat lots of lovely food).
Josh told us about his pets and recited an unpublished poem about his cat, Bluebell, which is all about the annoying things his cat gets up to. He got us all joining in with the poems, and making a lot of noise!
Josh's advice was to "Write about the things you care about."