The winners of this year's Edith Wharton Writing Competition. Sponsored by Berkshire Life Insurance Company of America, have been chosen!  We were very excited by the positive response from students in the area and had many excellent entries.  (We apologize to all for the delay in posting the results due to a technical glitch.)

                         

2010 Edith Wharton Writing Competition

Award Results

First-Prize $350 Awards*

 

Chelsea LeSage, Taconic High School – Fiction

 

Tegan O’Neil, Miss Halls School – Poetry

 

Merit-Prize $150 Awards

 

Rachel Graney, Monument Mountain High School – Fiction

 

Jessica Lopez, Monument Mountain High School – Non-Fiction Essay

 

Zachary Gross, Monument Mountain High School – Poetry

Honorable Mention Gift Awards

Lindsay Lee, Williston Northampton – Fiction

 

Hannah Oleksak, Williston Northampton – Fiction

 

Elizabeth McGovern, Helen Berube Teen Parent Program – Non-Fiction Essay

 

Kyra Brown, Williston Northampton - Non-Fiction Essay

 

Sarah Lister, Monument Mountain High School - Poetry

 

 *The Judge ruled not to award a First-Prize in the category of Non-Fiction Essay      

 

Edith Wharton’s professional writing career began at a young age; she was only sixteen years old when her first poem appeared in print in the influential Atlantic Monthly magazine.  Over the course of the next half-century, Wharton published more than forty books and contributed numerous essays, articles, pieces of war correspondence and poems to a variety of the nation’s leading literary magazines.  Wharton became the best-selling author of her generation and the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  The Mount’s Edith Wharton Writing Competition was created to honor Wharton’s remarkable legacy, and to support and recognize emerging young writers in her beloved Berkshire region.

 

All contestants and their teachers and parents will be formally invited to attend an awards ceremony and reception inside the The Mount mansion in May.

Thank you again to everyone who entered, their parents, their teachers, and of course to Berkshire Life Insurance Company of America and the Berkshire Eagle for their generous sponsorship of the competition.

For further information contact Ryan McLaughlin at
(413) 551-5118 or email rmclaughlin@edithwharton.org.

"... the creative imagination can make a little go a long way"
Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction, 1925

 

CATEGORIES:       

 

Non-fiction Essay

Contestants must submit a personal response of 1500 - 2000 words to one of the following statements:

 

-“I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life…” (Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance 1934) 

or

 
-“…Every yard of the Way to Wisdom has to be travelled on foot, and not spun over in a joy ride.” (Edith Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning 1919)

 

Fiction

Contestants must submit an original story on a subject of their choice; length not to exceed 2000 words.

 

Poetry

Contestants may submit up to four original poems.

 

PRIZES:

$350 awarded for first-prize in each category

$150 awarded for a certificate of merit in each category

Gifts awarded for honorable mention in each category

 

RULES

No work entered in The 2010 Edith Wharton Writing Competition may have been submitted previously to any other competition, or have been used prior for any program, scholarship or collegiate application.  

Each student may submit only one entry per category, but may enter multiple categories.

 

SUBMISSIONS

Please submit two copies of each entry. Each submission must include a coversheet (please use enclosed coversheet and photocopy as necessary). The first page of each fiction and essay entry and all poems entered must include the work’s title, but omit the author’s name. All entries must be typed on standard 81/2” x 11” paper. Electronic entries will not be accepted.