London teens win trip to Amsterdam, tour of Anne Frank House in writing contest
Emmanuelle Kiyoyo, 13, and Abubakar Subeer, 15, were named overall winners of the Anne Frank Trust's first ever anti-racism writing contest.
Two London teenagers have won a trip to Amsterdam and a tour of the Anne Frank House after scooping the top prize in a writing contest inspired by the Jewish diarist.
Emmanuelle Kiyoyo, 13, and Abubakar Subeer, 15, were named overall winners of the Anne Frank Trust’s first ever anti-racism writing contest.
The Creative Writing Awards, which were open to children aged between 10 and 15, received close to a thousand entries from across the UK.
Submissions were judged by the Girl, Woman, Other author Bernardine Evaristo, whose 2019 novel won the Booker Prize, and the poet and TS Eliot Prize nominee Anthony Anaxagorou.
Kiyoyo’s essay about the Black Lives Matter movement impressed Evaristo for its “mature fluency” and “structure, which begins with George Floyd’s death and, inspired by Anne Frank’s ability to believe in hope.”
Meanwhile, Subeer’s poem, entitled Eclipse, featured “superb metaphor throughout,” according to Anaxagorou, who noted its “imagery and thinking.”
Tim Robertson, chief executive of the Anne Frank Trust UK, said the charity had been “overwhelmed” by the level of entries and participants’ commitment to challenging prejudice.
The awards, he said, took place during “an especially turbulent period in our society and I congratulate all the young people who took part and rose to the challenge, especially Emmanuelle and Abubakar for their beautiful, mature and powerful work.”
Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House was set up in 1957 to commemorate the place where Frank and her family hid for two years during the German occupation of the Netherlands.
Her posthumously published diary, which stands testament to the horrors of Nazi rule, has sold over 36 million copies globally and been translated into 67 languages.
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