Creative Writing Competition
Tuesday 31 May 2005

Ivan Higgins and Patricia Scanlon

The award ceremony for the annual DCU Library's Creative Writing Competition was held in DCU Library on Thursday 26th May 2005. The competition has been running for 6 years and is open to participants of adult reading and writing schemes in North Dublin.

The event was extremely well attended with over 70 members attending from a variety of reading and writing schemes throughout North Dublin. Eleven awards were presented in total, one to the overall winner and commendations to 10 others (see below). All received certificates and book tokens. This year the 11 winners have been invited back to DCU to attend a creative writing workshop hosted by Dr Bill Dorris, a lecturer in the School of Communications. Bill gave a workshop to the 2004 winners which proved highly popular.

Our special guest for the evening was the international best selling author Patricia Scanlan. Patricia was the co-founder and is currently series editor of the Open Door series published by New Island Press. The series comprises short novels written by major Irish writers, including Dermot Bolger, Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes and Roddy Doyle and is aimed specifically at adults learning to read.

The award ceremony began with the presentation by the judging panel of the 10 commendations. Each member of the judging panel described why they had chosen to present their particular commendation. After each presentation the winner was invited to read out their winning entry.

Patrica was then invited to present the main prize of the evening to the overall competition winner. Before she did, she told the audience how honoured she was to be in the company of so many fellow writers. She had listened intently to the stories and poems and described how she found them highly evocative and moving. She then went on to talk about the winning poem by Ivan Higgins, and how she had found his poem to be powerful and disturbing.

The evening was a huge success with special thanks going to the Library staff who volunteered to judge and organise the competition this year; to the local organisers and tutors of the participating reading and writing schemes, Patricia Scanlan and of course the participants themselves. The Library would also like to thank Derek O'Broin, NorDubCo for his continued sponsorship of this event.