In the seventh week of last term, Etcetera Magazine, literary supplement to Cherwell, held their first Freestyle Writing Competition in honour of World Book Day. The competition came to a head on World Book Day, Thursday, March 3rd at Oxfam’s flagship bookshop on St. Giles where eleven finalists were called upon to read their work to the assembled crowd.
The readings took place over the course of an hour and were extremely well attended to the point that the windows of Oxfam were all steamed up leaving passers-by wondering what was happening inside.
Three winners have recently been announced and have received World Classics donated by the Oxford University Press. Jonnie McAloon took first place for his short story, Arthur and The Tobacchus. Antonio Di Fiore was awarded second place for his poem, God’s Work. Finally, Archie Cornish came in third with his poem, The Power Kite.
The Etcetera team, who judged the competition, received over seventy submissions in varying forms of prose, poetry, and even song, making for some very difficult decision making. In the face of such stiff competition, Francesca Goodwin, Etcetera Content Editor and Events Organiser, said of McAloon’s winning story, ‘it embodies what we believe good contemporary fiction should be; original, concise, and entertaining’.
Similarly, Content Editor Becky Gardner noted that judging the competition was truly an inspiring experience in that ‘it just goes to show how much talent there really is in Oxford’.
All three winning submissions will be featured in Issue 22 of Etcetera which will be published in the second week of Trinity Term and can be found in copies of Cherwell.
