Young Reporter Scarlett Tynan-Morris, Year 10 pupil at Comberton Village College

I attended a free Cambridge Literary Festival session for students at non-fee paying schools. Hosted by the Cambridge Union, the Hostile Environment event featured author Ali Smith, journalist Amelia Gentleman, campaigner Michael Braithwaite and illustrator Woodrow Phoenix on Thursday 18 April.

The event was inspired by The Litmus School Writing Project for students to come and consider this year’s theme: Hostile Environment.

The session began with Amelia Gentleman, award-winning journalist and author of The Windrush Betrayal and campaigner Michael Braithwaite in conversation explaining and discussing the Windrush scandal, and how it linked with the theme of Hostile Environment. We each got given a copy of Amelia Gentleman’s book, which was shortlisted for the Orwell prize in 2020.

Writer and illustrator Woodrow Phoenix led an engaging interactive session where he demonstrated how to make a storyboard by letting the audience of schoolchildren shout out locations, character ideas and name suggestions. This was extremely fun, and we all made a few stories together - lots of crazy ideas but it all came together nicely with Woodrow’s help.

At the end of both sections, there was a Q&A to answer any questions the audience had about what we had heard, which was helpful, and interesting to hear what other people had to say about it.

We got to meet the speakers afterwards and ask them any follow-up questions we had and some people had books signed. I would recommend going to events on at the Cambridge Literary Festival, it was a lot of fun and we learned a lot.

The event we attended was part of the Litmus Creative Writing Project. The project, run by Trinity College, Cambridge, is looking for entries from year 9-11 students who currently are attending state school in the UK to submit a short piece of writing under 500 words based around the theme Hostile Environment for publication.

The deadline is 19 July 2024, so if this is something you’d be interested in stop reading this and get writing!