Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Congratulations to young mum Santhia Sukumar and schoolboy Nathan Crasta for winning GulfWeekly’s Two Minute Tales competition.
In recent weeks Education Matters columnist Chris Fenton has written about reluctant readers and writers and set a challenge to readers of all ages. A great way of getting reluctant readers to have a go at a story is to read short stories with them that get to the point quickly but are entertaining at the same time.
One of the best means of doing this is through Two Minute Tales, (stories with a beginning, middle and end of approximately 500 words that take only two minutes or so to read).
In the spirit of getting Bahrain reading, we challenged adults and children to write a Two Minute Tale for children on any topic and in any genre. Santhia won the adult section with her entry entitled Keeping My Fangs and Nathan came up trumps with his tale called The Comedy Dummy.
Both wowed judges - Chris and GulfWeekly Editor Stan Szecowka - from the selection of creative entries. Santhia, 31, from the Indian state of Kerala, lives in Juffair with her husband, Ashwath Mohandas, 34, a Bapco planning engineer, and their daughter, Nainika, four. “I wanted to tell a child friendly vampire story, and include the shyness trait which kids could relate to,” she explained, who has picked prizes in the past for her writing skills at the KKS Kerala social club during her student years in Bahrain.
Indian expat Nathan, 11, lives in Hoora with his dad, Ovin, an IT manager with BNP Paribas, mum Preeti and brother Jayden, nine, said he was inspired to write his story after watching a ventriloquist video on YouTube and reading a book about an inanimate object coming life, so he put ‘two and-two together’ to create his own story. The talented Sacred Heart pupil has won essay writing and elocution competitions at school and has ambitions to become an artist, writer, inventor or maybe a scientist when he gets older. “Let’s see what the future unfolds,” he added.
The winners each received a prize plaque with their names emblazoned in all their glory.
