Chaucer inspires Perse pupils to top prizes in literary competition
John (Year 7) and Francis (Year 5) secured a brotherly double with victories in a national creative writing competition.
The siblings won their respective categories in the Canterbury Tales Writing Competition, organized by The Chaucer Heritage Trust, with John taking the honours in the 11-14 age group and Francis the 5-10 section.
With the competition’s theme being ‘Surprise, Surprise’, entrants had to produce a piece of creative writing of up to 500 words, written in the spirit of Geoffrey Chaucer’s revered 14th Century collection.
Francis’ piece was part-prose, part-poem, based around the interactions of various animals, including a dragonfly, water vole, heron, frog and beaver, during their annual meet-up on the riverbank.
Meanwhile, John’s verse told of an eclectic group of characters taking part in a pilgrimage to the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela.
John said: “We were planning a holiday to Santiago de Compostela, so I put two and two together and made Santiago rather than Canterbury the place where they wanted to get to.
“I retold it with the characters of the Historian, the Duchess, the Naturalist and the Deacon, with myself as the narrator and main character.
“Each character was given a unique token at the pilgrims’ office at the start of their trek, which was typically a scallop shell, but my character has a doubled scallop shell with something inside it.
“The idea is the person who can tell the best story about what’s in the shell gets to keep it, so they guess it’s things such as treasure or a rare butterfly, but the surprise at the end is it’s actually a snail!”
John enjoyed writing the poem, but felt the most difficult part was editing it to meet the word length, having originally written 800 words.
He added: “I love Chaucer’s writing. I just really like his characters and his themes for the stories. They also really capture Medieval times.
“I enjoy writing and I’m really proud of my poem, and for both myself and my brother to win the competition is great.”
You can read both their winning entries by clicking here.