Winner of Steffi McBride Competition

The winner of the Steffi McBride short story competition is fourteen year-old Nicole Hendry with her piece, “Do You Think It’s Fair?”. It was just as hard a choice as I had thought it would be but there were a number of reasons why I eventually plumped for this one over the very strong competition.
To start with, of course, there is the standard of the writing. Phrases like “the ache was unbearable, like someone tightening the gears in her face with a spanner” and “she heard her mother’s irritated footsteps ascend the stairs” seemed to sing off the page.
The rules of the competition were that it should be about ‘modern celebrity’ and the subjects of anorexia and of fame being forced on people too young to handle it both seem particularly relevant. The fact that they are being written about by someone who is still the same age as the protagonist also strikes me as important, providing a contrast to us older authors who would naturally see things from a different and perhaps more objective perspective.
I must also confess that Nicole’s story rings some personal bells for me as well. Soon after I left school, many years ago, I worked in a modelling agency and school in Bond Street. I may even have worn a ‘pin-striped suit’, certainly many of my older colleagues did. Even then, when I was still young and hungry, and the instant celebrity business was also still in its infancy, I wondered what was going on in the heads of the girls, many of whom were as young as fourteen, who flocked through the doors in search of fame and adoration in much the same way as X-Factor contestants do today.
I can’t wait to see what Nicole comes up with next.

Celebrity Short Story Finalists

The three finalists in the Steffi McBride Celebrity short story competition range in age from fourteen to sixty, which I guess just goes to show how all-pervasive celebrity culture is now, and also that the urge to write arrives early and does not dim with the years.
At fourteen, Nicole Hendry is probably a more typical Steffi McBride reader and the one who you would most expect to be wrapped up in the spell of celebrity culture, so much of which is marketed directly towards girls of her generation. Yet both the other finalists are linked in other ways; Veronica Ryder is a keen amateur actress and so understands the lure of the spotlight and Sue Clark is currently working as a writer for a consultancy which specialises in creating a marketing buzz through the use of new media – another link to the world of Steffi McBride.
In her story, “Do you Think It’s Fair? Nicole creates a real air of danger and potential evil with her sharp descriptions of how the forces of celebrity drive her heroine into the arms of anorexia. The incredibly sharp writing makes you long to find out more about the characters sketched in the background.
In “The Purple Peignoir” Sue Clark creates two very interesting characters, neither of which are obvious candidates for modern celebrity but one of whom, Eloise, may well turn out to be one of the founding mothers of the movement. If we knew more we would not only be able to enter the now relatively distant world of the Swinging Sixties, but we would also be able to see what happens to someone when their grip on the spotlight begins to weaken.
In ‘Losing Abby’ Veronica Ryder managed to surprise me several times with unexpected twists to the plot and being the father of an ingénue actress/singer myself I recognise all too clearly the mother’s description of how she feels she is losing Abby to the lure of spotlight.
Having to put aside the seven others from the short list was just as horrible as I expected. I feel sure that many of them could still be worked up into successful novels and I hope all the authors will feel sufficiently encouraged by their success to want to give it a go.
Interviews with the three finalists will be going up on the Steffi McBride website this week and now all I have to do is decide which of them should be the overall winner.