Celebrated storytellers

This year’s Clare Champion Short Story competition yielded a record number of entries, with 270 short stories received from secondary school students across the county.
Speaking at the awards ceremony held in the De Valera Library on Thursday last, John Galvin, managing director of The Clare Champion, commended the short-listed entries, who he said were all winners as this year’s standards were very high.
He said that in the modern age of email, Facebook and Twitter we probably write more in our day-to-day lives than heretofore, but it was important not to let writing standards drop.
Clare Champion editor Austin Hobbs added, “I really enjoy this occasion as I see young writers emerge year after year. It’s rewarding for The Clare Champion that we continue to get a great response to the competition.”
Winner of first place in the senior category was Keelan Cunningham of Kilrush Community School.
Highly commended in the junior category last year, he said his winning entry, entitled Transience did not take that long to compose.
“Not really, I went to do it one night and wrote the whole story. Then I changed it around a few times and that was it.”
Of the winning entry, he said, “It was a story about transience. My English teacher is quite fond of the word and the story is about how a boy of my age sees transience in everyday life. He doesn’t like the word but it comes back to haunt him and he sees it as necessary in life in the end.”
Orna Lynch, a transition year student at Coláiste Muire Ennis, received the second prize in the senior category for her short story Trinity College. She explained her story is about the friendship between a boy and a girl and how going to college changes their relationship.
“The girl is jealous that he got accepted to do law in Trinity and I am interested in law so that’s why I brought that into it,” Orna said.
She said her passion for story writing came during her junior cert year, when she realised she loved English. This was Orna’s first year entering the short story competition.
The safety of young people online is a major concern nowadays and it was the theme for Sorcha Ni Gríofa’s entry Safe, which won third prize in the senior category.
“It’s about a girl who meets someone on the internet and she wants to meet them in real life then. It takes a dark turn.”
She said she wanted her entry to be quite contemporary.
“It’s a modern thing, it wouldn’t have happened ten years ago or so. It’s quite new and I’ve heard of it happening more and more on Facebook and stuff. Supposedly a huge percentage of people meet online nowadays, so I thought it was relevant.”
Aoife Daly, a first year student at St Anne’s Community College, Killaloe, received the top prize in the junior category for her short story, Memory Lane.
The 13-year-old’s story focused in on an older lady looking back on her life and comparing what her life was like growing up to modern Ireland now.
The inspiration came from her grandparents, according to Aoife.
“I was thinking of my grandparents and how different things are now, things have changed a lot for them,” she said.
Maddy Jarocka of Kilrush Community School took the second prize in the junior category for her short story, Out of Sight, Out of Mind. This tale follows the story of a female assassin.
Maddy explained that she built the story around the title. “She’s an assassin and she’s supposed to be undercover, but then she is exposed in the newspapers,” she said.
Junior third prize winner Elaine Russell got her idea for My Own Place from one of her favourite school subjects. “I’m really interested in geography at the moment so I wrote about a diamond mine, the idea came from my geography class.”
A self-confessed perfectionist, she said she spent quite a long time on the essay.
“It did take a good while. I usually have to write things twice and fix everything.”
Highly commended awards were also presented to senior category entries Zoe West, Coláiste Muire Ennis for her story Resilience; Mark Maguire of St Flannan’s College, Ennis for The Ever-Present Darkness and Cathal McClean of St Patrick’s Comprehensive School, Shannon for The Piano.
The highly commended junior category recipients were: Emma Greene of Scoil Mhuire Ennistymon for her story Hope Helps; Lisa Ní Fhoghlú of Gaelcholáiste an Chláir, Ennis for A Precious Gift; Emmet O’Doherty of St Flannan’s College, Ennis for Snow Fox.

n Keelan Cunningham from Kilrush, senior category winner, with Aoife Daly from Killaloe, winner in the
junior category.
Photograph by Declan Monaghan