World Book Day 2020 was marked by a week of exciting literary events at Didcot Girls’ School. Year 7 students were involved in the first of the celebrations with a visit from award-wining author, and former DGS Patron of Reading, Jo Cotterill. As ever, Jo’s talk was energetic and inspiring, with much laughter from the audience. Jo demonstrated her writing process by getting suggestions from the audience for characters and plot ideas. The result was an epic fantasy adventure involving a girl who develops super powers – our Year 7 students are clearly a creative group with many budding writers among them! A number of students were then able to develop some of their story-writing further with a creative-writing workshop.

On Tuesday, Teri Terry spoke to Year 8 students about her winding path to becoming an author, which involved living in many countries and trying out lots of different jobs. Teri is now confident that writing futuristic thrillers is the career for her, which is great news for our students! The audience was even treated to a first look at Teri’s brand new book, which will be published later this year.

World Book Day itself saw dozens of students coming to school dressed as a book character for our annual costume competition. With so many fantastic entries, our judging panel had a very difficult decision to make. The winners will be announced in next week’s assemblies. Two of our Year 7 students also held a book sale in aid of Huntington’s Disease Association. It was wonderful to see the girls take the initiative to raise money for charity, and do so with such great organisation.

To conclude the week, our Patron of Reading, Mary Stevens, held a story-writing masterclass. Four students, who were chosen as a result of their brilliant entries to the short story competition we ran earlier in the year, took part in this session. Mary was incredibly impressed with the gripping and moving story openings the girls were able to produce in just one hour.