By Geoff Vivian | posted on September 14, 2017
DENMARK Senior High School student Tigerlily Plater was a finalist in the prestigious Tim Winton Award for Young Writers last week.
She won second place in the lower secondary division for her short story I Never Left.
It is a mystery thriller set in an Australian outback town featuring a teenaged boy who meets a beautiful mysterious girl on his first day in town.
Tigerlily said she had never lived in the Goldfields but loved writing stories using her own imagination.
“Sometimes I’ll find an idea will just pop into my brain and I’ll go and I’ll write down as much as I can before I get bored of the idea,” she said.
“Then another one will come along I really like, so I stick with it.”
Tigerlily said she was excited when she found out she was invited to the presentation.
“I was at the school when my teacher came over and he gave me a printout of the email saying I’d been accepted to go into the top 10,” she said.
“It was in front of the whole class and he made a bit of a deal about it, which was really nice.”
Award-winning author Tim Winton made the presentations at Subiaco Library last week.
Tigerlily said meeting Mr Winton was a bit intimidating at first.
“He was really lovely,” she said.
“I expected him to be bit more prim and proper, but he was really casual and very friendly.”
When addressing the finalists and their families, Mr Winton acknowledged the hard work of West Australian students not just this year, but stretching back more than two decades.
He also commented on the high quality of this year’s stories and the writers’ “very impressive use of language”.
“People are saying that this impressive use of language is being lost, but I did not see that in these stories,” he said.
A staunch advocate for storytelling, Mr Winton talked of its importance in today’s society.
“Stories are our culture; the stories we tell are the bedrock of our culture – we need to tell each other stories,” he said.
More than 1400 young authors entered the creative writing award, which is open to primary and secondary school students across WA.
The finalists’ stories can be read online at www.subiaco.wa.gov.au/timwintonaward.
