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Tell us a story… What would you do if you were invisible?

If you’re aged between 11 and 16 you can enter a short story competition to win a place on the judging panel for the BooktrustTeenage Prize 2010. The winner will also receive a ticket to the award ceremony in London in November; the chance to meet and interview all the shortlisted authors, using a flipcam; a complete set of the shortlisted titles; and will have their winning story published on the Booktrust website.

The challenge is to write a 500-word short story on the subject: What would you do if you were invisible? The deadline for competition entries is 5 July 2010.

Download the enrty form here. 

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Storyteller, spoken-word artist, rapper, poet – call him what you will. Polarbear, the West Midlands’ finest export, sure knows how to spin a yarn.

Interview by Lara Akinnawo, aged 19

Why did you pick the name Polarbear? It’s a tragic story: I was obsessed with them when I was a little. When I was primary school age I was tiny. I’d get pushed around a lot. I was obsessed with two things: wildlife programmes and Maradona. I watched a wildlife programme about polar bears and it said that polar bears are the only animal on the planet that have no natural predator, except for themselves. I tried to get people to call me Polarbear. They were having none of it. Then when I got into hip-hop later on, I needed a name and everyone else was calling themselves stuff like MC I’ll Punchya, MC Knife and I was like – I’ll go with this.

How did you first get started? It was all just a crazy accident that I ran with. A power cut meant I got involved in this world of spoken word, and before I knew it, I was Polarbear. I did a gig in Birmingham that was meant to be one thing, but ended up being another, where I got up and just rhymed without power, without backing tracks. There was a guy in the audience who saw me and said: “I’d like you to do a gig for me, spoken word.” Like the cliché goes somebody saw me at Glastonbury and then word got around.

What makes you keep doing it? The immediacy - when I first started I was 25. Between 21 and 25, before I graduated – I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. So I’d been doing all these office jobs and been having all these ideas and doing nothing with them, so when it actually started - I just wrote for days. The reason I keep doing it is because there’s loads of stories that I want to tell.

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If you're aged 11-19 and write short stories then the Litro & IGGY International Young Person's Short Story Award is for you!

You could win £2,500, have your work published in Litro Magazine and see parts of your work displayed on a poster in a London Underground station! 

The Award will be judged by a panel of successful writers and artists (left to right): novelist Sadie Jones, poet Laura Dockrill, author and actor Ian Kelly and creative writing lecturer Peter Blegvad.

Closing date: 5pm, Friday 25 June 2010. Go here to find out more.

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