The 28th edition of Spark Young Writers Magazine is out now. Published online in April 2024, the magazine features some of the best writing produced by children and young people aged 8 to 20 who live in the West Midlands region. Editor’s pick this issue is a piece by Sabine O’Mahoney called Delphi.
To read Issue 28, click here. To access it as a pdf, click here.
If you’re interested in submitting to the next issue, find out how here.
Sometimes if I’m in a school or running a writing session and the young writers look like I’ve set them something impossible, I will say: “Would I ask you to do something I couldn’t do myself?”
The smart ones always say yes – and of course they’re right, of course I would. There’s no point having a group of writers if you can’t get them to write more or better than you.
But for this issue of Spark Young Writers Magazine, there is one piece I truly do not comprehend how it could be done. Take a look at “Winter Renga“: it’s the magazine’s first-ever group-written piece and it’s tremendous.
I’d say that so many of this issue’s pieces are tremendous, but then that’s the point: they have to be or they don’t get in.
Yet of them all, it was still easy to pick “Delphi” by Sabine O’Mahoney as the Editor’s Choice. It’s intentionally simple and stark, but O’Mahoney clearly knows that writing is both about the words you use and the words you don’t, because it’s the unspoken sense of loss that will stay with you.
William Gallagher
Editor