Last weekend I attended the launch of Pot-pourri 2025, a gorgeous collection of the winning works of this year’s Ottawa Public Library Awesome Authors contest. The book showcases eighteen contest winners, with poems, comics, and short stories in English and French from authors aged 9-12 and 13-18.
There was a great turnout at this year’s launch, which was hosted by the Beaverbrook branch in Kanata. (So many refreshments! It was hard to limit myself to one piece of cake.) I met all three of the young writers whose work won in the English Short Story category for ages 9-12 (the category I judged):
- Selena Baksh won first place for “Things they Don’t Tell You,” a moving piece about life in middle school, a real standout for maturity and emotional impact.
- Vivienne Chafe won second place for “No One is Unlucky,” a realistic story about a cat adoption, brought to life through lovely phrasing and perfect pacing.
- Cecelia Hope Corrigan won third place for “Hot Dog Hazard,” a fun adventure about thieving hounds, vividly rendered through polished prose and spot-on characterization.
I’ve been judging the contest for several years now and I don’t think I’ve ever met all the winners in my category before.
You can read their stories — and fifteen other winning pieces — in Pot-pourri 2025. They are exemplary. (I use Pot-pourri when I teach creative writing to elementary and high schools students. The contest is important not just for the winners, or even all the entrants, but for all young people to see what writers their age are capable of.)
Judging the contest is always difficult and many deserving stories must be left unchosen. Because it’s a writing contest, with no revision process, I tend to favour polished works. But there were another dozen stories on my shortlist this year that had a special spark, something really outstanding about them, along with some flaws. They’re diamonds in the rough. Although they didn’t win a place in the book, their authors are awesome, and I hope they keep writing. (You can work on the flaws; it’s much much harder to work on the spark!)
You don’t get to see any rough diamonds in Pot-pourri 2025. But you do get to see a lot of shiny diamonds. That’s what Pot-pourri is: a collection of treasures created by very talented young people.
The contest and the book are funded every year by the Friends of the Ottawa Public Library Association. You can buy a copy of Pot-pourri 2025 at one of FOPLA’s monthly Mammoth Book Sales, or borrow a copy from any OPL branch. Maybe it’ll inspire you to enter the contest next year. (More to come on that in January.)
Congratulations to each of this year’s winners.
(The banner image for this post is from the Ottawa Public Library’s Pot-pourri 2025 announcement.)
Catherine Austen 