The Ottawa Public Library’s Awesome Authors Youth Writing Contest was another great success this year, and I was thrilled to be part of it.
The winners will be honoured this fall, with the publication of this year’s Pot-pourri, but you can read the list of winning Awesome Author 2024 entries right now on the OPL website.
If you entered the contest but did not win, please don’t feel bad! There are just too many good pieces to honour them all. As a judge of 9-12 English fiction, I read over 200 short stories this year and had a top-50 long-list. It was incredibly difficult to narrow them down to 3 winners and 3 honourable mentions. So many great stories had to be left out — with no way to tell their authors how awesome they are.
I know all the other judges feel the same way — there are just too many good pieces! But this is life in the world of publishing. And that’s a world we all want to keep spinning. 🙂
Please enter the contest again next year. It’s open to Ottawa students working in English or French, aged 9-18, writing poetry, short fiction, and comics. I’ll post again when the 2025 contest opens (whether I’m a judge or not — I’m a staunch supporter). That’s usually in late December or early January.
In the meantime, a huge congratulations to this year’s winners. I hope to meet you at the ceremony this fall.
I’ll post an update when the 2024 Pot-pourri anthology is published. In the meantime, check out the winning pieces from past years of Pot-pourri, published annually by the Friends of the Ottawa Public Library Association.
And keep writing!
Catherine Austen 