The 30th edition of Spark Young Writers Magazine is out now. Published online in April 2025, 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 Ruby called You Didn’t Notice.
To read Issue 30, click here. To access it as a PDF, click here.
If you’re interested in submitting to the next issue, find out how here.
Thirty issues ago, “Spark Young Writers’ Magazine” set out to of course be a great read, but also to give young writers what might be their first professional credit. You can send just about anything in to the magazine, but it will be treated the same way that the magazine’s same editors work with adult and experienced writers.
Except as a professional magazine writer myself, I can tell you what you may already know and can certainly guess: it is incredibly hard to write for a title when the brief is that you can send just about anything in. Yet this edition is bursting with prose and poems that are exceptional reads, and which also reveal so much about their writers.
Sometimes also their writers’ parents. I’m thinking of “Family” by Philippa L. You’ll see.
But if I urge you to read that, and I urge you read all of the issue, do start with “You Didn’t Notice” by Ruby. That poem has been in my head since I read it right at the start of editing this issue and it is my editor’s choice for the 30th Spark Young Writers’ Magazine.
William Gallagher
Editor