Winners and shortlist:

11-13
1st – Sarah Gill, Tapton (also overall winner)
2nd – Alice Corker, Tapton13
& Josh Roberts, 13, Wilsthorpe Business and enterprise College
3rd - Laurel Quinn, 13, Tapton
Special mentions:
Ella Atcheson, Tapton


14-16
1st – Miriam Dobson, 16, Sheffield High
2nd – Mark Roberts, 15, Newbold Community School
3rd – Adam Mintram, 16, Meadowhead school
Special mentions:
Mikey Hindle, 15, King Edwards
Harvey Yates, 14, Tapton
Georgia Wigley, 14, Tapton


17-18
1st – Jane Hogan, 18, Highfields School, Matlock
2nd – Eleanor Kaufman, 17, Silverdale school
3rd – Martha Kunda, 17, Sheffield college


Thanks to all who entered Photofiction 2007
Final shortlist: Hillary Bell, Emma Cassinelli, Rachel Stacey, Rosie King, Stephen Wragg, Andrew Willis, Eilidh Brown, Joe Place, Kathryn Morgan, Katie Barker, Luke Gannon, Luke Tomlinson, Rebecca Butler, Adele Walker, Alex Hill, Connie Hobbs, Corrine Look, Daniel Baggs, Emily Bates, Emily Bathie, Ethan Jeffrey, George Loosley, Hannah Singleton, Howard Harbour, Jed Dixon, Micheal Rochester, Mike Lazenby, Poppy Read, Rechel Gill, Sarah Allsop, Thomas Pickford, Zachary Child, Hattie Penman, Howra Ktayen, Gabrielle Frith, Sophie Cunningham, Daniel Kiernan, Sarah Sivan-Whitehouse. Apologies to anyone who might have been missed.

The second year of our PhotoFiction writing competition was once again a great success. We received a whopping 433 entries from young people across South Yorkshire and Derbyshire. Over twice the amount as last year! Once again the judges were very impressed by the range and standard of work the competition attracted. The only hard part was choosing shortlists and winners out of so many fantastic entries.

PhotoFiction short-listers and winners were invited to perform their work and collect prizes at the ‘Words Aloud: Young People take the Mic’ open Mic event, as part of Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Literature Festival Autumn 2007. It was a great night with winners performing along side members of Sheffield Young Writers and competition judges to a warm and encouraging crowd. View the competition

Young People Take The Mic- Off The Shelf 2007

Introduction: I tried to bring together the elements from the photograph as though they were evidence in an investigation, or elements to a witness’ story in court.

They say that, at the moment of death, your life will flash before
your eyes, every sacred secret memory relived for the briefest of pauses before the hammer falls and you are gone. It’s an idea that has occupied me many a night, lying awake with only my thoughts for company. When the time comes, who knows which snapshots of the past your mind will choose to show you for the final time?

Bang. The sound of a window slamming shut as the rain begins to fall. The bathroom at my flat in town, cracked windows and peeling paint, my latest project – that old duck – floating in the sink, as if there was life still in its shining feathers. It was my mother who first got me interested. Taxidermy. At fourteen, the whole idea seemed strangely fascinating. Romantic, even. Nobody would have guessed where it would lead, twelve years on. Nobody would have thought it.

Bang. A head, my head, slamming against the wall, my body sliding to the ground, powerless, powerless. Shattered glass from the mirror by the basin, hot blood running down my face and clouding my eyes.A nailed boot slamming into my ribs. Fists and fury. What could I do? It’s just the drink, I tell myself. It’s not his fault. I love him, don’t I? I love him. Ilove him.
Bang. That unmistakeable sound of a gun being fired. Flowers in the street, flowers by the lamppost. Red flowers, replacing spilt blood, in memory of a life lost too soon. Not soon enough. Walking to the graveyard. Standing through the funeral. The day passing in a dreamlike state, the knowledge that I would no longer be walking into doors. I would no longer be falling down the stairs. Not anymore.

Bang. The judge’s hammer. Handcuffs and uniforms. The years and months and days. Bang. The clash of metal on metal, the cell door slamming shut, the sneering face of a prison guard. The time spent locked in my own mind. Remembering how carefully, how lovingly I stitched the severed hand back together. As what? A trophy? A memory? A souvenir? I hardly knew myself. They told me I was mad. In the end I began to believe them.

Bang. The handle pulled down and the current flowing and the pain, and the pain, and the pain, and the darkness.

I feel so alone and scared. All I can hear is the sound of waves washing on the shore and splashing up my legs. And the noise of seagulls calling to each other. And the wind whipping at my face. I sit down and pull my jumper tight around me. I run the warm soft sand through my fingers and toes. What shall I do? I can’t go back… Not now, not after what happened… But I can’t stay here. I stand up. I roll up my jeans. I tip-toe slowly into the cool refreshing water. I pick up a handful of stones and throw them out as far as I can into the sea, as if trying to throw all my troubles with them. I stroll up the beach and breathe in the fresh air. There is nobody here, there is nothing. Nothing but sand and sea and rocks. I meander aimlessly down the beach.

I get to the end and there is a big pile of rubbish that looks dumped there. Rotting planks of wood and bits of metal. Right at the edge of the stack is an old television set. All its buttons and switches are broken and it has a cracked screen. It looks so out of place and unwanted… Like me. I stand watching it. It used to belong to a home but now where does it belong? Not here. I used to belong to a family. I belonged to a family that loved and cared for me. No-one cares for me here. There is no-one to care for me here. The television stares at me blankly. I suddenly feel a warmth on my back, I turn around to see the sun has come out from behind a cloud. I smile as the rays warm up my face. I realise that I don’t want to end up washed up where I don’t belong. I want to go back. I want to go home. I don’t know what has made me change my mind. It’s like I have changed channels.

The sea had always entranced him. He loved her everything. He
loved her colour, the way it forever changed. He loved her shape and how it was never the same. He loved every wave, the little ones that lapped at the shore, erasing carefully drawn pictures and footprints. The bigger ones that made people squeal and taste the salt of the sea in their mouth. And the huge ones. The huge ones he loved best. He loved to be engulfed by a massive wave and have every single sense and feeling blocked by a towering mass of water. His ears heard only the mighty roar of the sea. His eyes felt only its bitter sting. His tongue and nose the salt. And his whole body was numbed by the cold and the pressure of the wave. And his mind, his mind was so overwhelmed by the sea and her beauty and her power that he forgot everything.

The hard black rocks gave the place an ominous feel. That was why he’d picked them. He climbed up onto them, his bare feet tearing on the rough edges and his calloused hands scratching on the corners. From the top of the rocks he watched her. The sea. The mighty sea. And he smiled. Through everything she had always been there. And now she was here to do him the greatest favour yet. He watched her whirl her dance, inviting him, taunting him. As he jumped he cried. He cried for everything. He cried for himself. He cried for her. He cried for everyone he was leaving behind. But most of all he cried to the sea.

Ever since he lost her, he’d felt empty. He’d felt a sense of not being. A sense of nothing. He had to drag himself everywhere and everything seemed to have nothing to it. Life had taken on a permanent shade of grey. The same shade of grey, it didn’t vary anywhere. Apart from when he looked at the sea. She still changed. He still loved the sea because the sea reminded him of her. Sometimes the two were one and the same. That was why it was the sea that had to take him. His heart belonged to
her and all that he was. The two were intrinsically linked. And as he fell, finally letting his tears of grief fall, they washed away all the grey of the world and he saw it in colour again. The last thing he saw, before he fell to her watery and merciless depths forever, was a burst of bright colours screaming at him and then his tears and the sea became one.

Introduction: “See it was a woman, as changing and harsh and untameable as the sea. He never stopped loving her. But the pain she had caused him was too much to live with, but not enough to cause him to die.”). That line from Pirates of the Caribbean, just gave me a lovely idea about a woman and the sea being one.