Recently, Grade 6 student, Mohak, was recognised as a Highly Commended Author within the 11-14 age category in the Creative Writing Competition. As students across all 69 Nord Anglia schools took part in this competition, this was an amazing achievement! We spoke to Mohak about what his inspirations were for his creative story.
Mohak, please tell us about the storyline and what gave you the idea to write this story?
"Well, my mom used to work as consultant for a foundation which retrieves plastic waste from rivers, and she told me how bad the situation is with plastic in the oceans, then she told me about Boyan Slat. After researching about Boyan Slat, I figured that I would be able to write about him. Boyan Slat is a Dutch person who started a business named "Ocean Cleanup" which is a company supposed to collect plastic from the oceans and then create some products out of them like sunglasses."
What inspired you to write your story in the format of a poem?
"When I was starting to write, I had researched quite a bit and I found it very challenging to write everything into only 250 words, I had to do everything differently if I wanted to include everything in the writing. Then it came into my mind that I should write a poem, I already learned how to write a poem from 5th grade."
How did you feel when you heard that you had won this award?
"I was very, very surprised as well as extremely happy. I wasn't expecting for the judges to appreciate a biography written as a poem I never thought that I would be Ranked as Highly Commended Author from the 11 - 14-year-old group and have my name posted in Facebook and the Global Campus website."
What do you enjoy about writing?
"I like how there is never one correct answer, we can write a paragraph many different ways and have them mean the same thing, we could do that with a sentence and even essays."
The digital anthology for the competition will be published later on this year. In the meantime, you can download and read Mohak's poem 'Our Ocean Pal, Boyan Slat' below. We are so proud of you Mohak!
