Lakefield Literary Festival's Young Writers Contest Names Record Number Of Winners

Seven winners for the Lakefield Literary Festival’s Young Writers Contest have been announced including, for the first time ever, a three way tie for the senior fiction category.

Winners in front of St Peter Secondary. Photo by Angela O’Grady

This year saw 92 entries to the contest from local schools throughout the Peterborough region.

2022 Young Writers Winners: 

• Junior Fiction: Kellan MacKenzie, Grade 10, SPSS 

• Junior Non-fiction: Madeleine Hill, Grade 10, SPSS 

• Junior Poetry: Kellan MacKenzie, Grade 10, SPSS 

• Senior Fiction: Clementine MacLeod, Grade 11, Adam Scott. Justin Ehlert, Grade 12, PACE. Hailey Cavanagh, Grade 11, SPSS. 

• Senior Non-fiction: Toula Pappas, Grade 11, SPSS 

• Senior Poetry: Abigail Auger, Grade 12, SPSS

Each of the winners will receive $200.00, a commemorative plaque, and publication in the Festival’s ebook.

Justin Ehlert, who attends PACE, was one of three winners in the Senior Fiction category.

Ehlert calls his piece ‘meta-fiction’.

“There was two layers,” he said. “One was me talking about my thought process as I was writing the story and then the story itself was about a man who recently lost his father.”

He says his story started with the setting, a lake, then he built a character around that and went from there.

“Truthfully I’m more of a reader than a writer,” he said. “I started this piece as an assignment and my teacher encouraged me to finish it and to submit it.”

Elhert says winning this contest may encourage him to write more in the future, though he doesn’t plan on making a career out of it.

Keeping writing as a hobby was a common theme among winners.

Abigail Auger, a grade 12 student at St Peter says she worries if she made a career of writing she would begin to see it as a chore.

Her poem which was inspired by the television series Gossip Girl won her first place in the Senior Poetry category.

She plans to attend Trent University to study Forensics.

Contest Co-Organizer and retired teacher Andrew Milner says he looks forward to reading entries every year.

“They’re such mature writers, it’s fascinating to see what they come up with every year,” he said.

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