Nadia Shireen announces winners of Me, Myself and I writing competition

Published on: 09 July 2018

BookTrust's Writer in Residence Nadia Shireen has announced the five young winners of her Me, Myself and I competition.

The competition, which was open to primary school children, invited young writers to pen a short story about anything they wanted - as long as they were the lead character.

Nadia has now chosen five winners, whose stories will be turned into books by the publisher Penguin Random House.

'A huge hooray and thank you to every single young writer who entered the Me, Myself and I competition,' said Nadia. 'You're amazing! I was completely overwhelmed by the number and quality of entries. Kids wrote in from every corner of the country with gorgeous, funny, inventive and - quite frankly - utterly barmy stories.

'It made me feel so proud and hopeful for our future, because we have a nation absolutely teeming with imaginative young writing talent.

'Well done, authors - you are absolutely crazy... but in the very best way. And please keep writing and drawing so we can all enjoy the brilliant worlds you have created.'

Nadia explained that she set up the competition because she wants every child to be able to see themselves represented in books, regardless of gender, ethnicity or social class.

The five winners are:

• Nancy Biddlecombe for 'Leaping Beauty', a rhyming tale about a sassy princess
• Charlie Parry for 'My Little Brother Jamie', a sweet story about siblings
• Jinyao Wang for 'The Battle vs Wizzard and ME!', an adventure featuring a wizzard-fighting sausage
• Eissa Adebambi for 'The Tree Monster', a tale about a young boy's friendship with a 'humongous bush with one log as his eyebrow'
• Anya Mather for 'The Wrong Way', a fantastic caper which all starts with a journey through some magical trousers...

In addition, Nadia picked ten runners-up from more than 600 entries that were received.

'A huge congratulations to the five wonderful winners - your stories were brilliant and touched on some great topics such as adventure and friendship,' said BookTrust CEO Diana Gerald.

'We've loved working with Nadia on the Me, Myself and I competition, helping children have more confidence to write themselves into stories. It's such an important and excellent exercise as it helps to widen the appeal of reading, so that every child, whatever their background, sees reading as "for them".'

Read all the stories by the winners and runners-up in full

Download the full press release