5 January 2018 - Poetry entries

This was the first meeting lead by our new Chairperson, Amanda Giles. The meeting started with some information sharing and opinion gathering about ideas for enhancing elements of the organisation of the meetings and the activity programme. It was agreed that further evaluation, taking into account the views of all members, will take place over the coming weeks. This evening members read their entries to this years first competition - poetry writing. As always, the quality of writing was extremely high, and a broad and interesting range of subjects were featured. Members wrote about love, life, war, foreign lands and anarchic circus clowns. This was followed by a short writing activity. Each member selected a random word from a envelope and created a short poem using their word as inspiration. This was extremely successful and it was agreed that more activities of this kind should be considered for future meetings.

Annual Presentation Evening - Friday 8th December 2017

Our Annual Presentation Evening was a celebration of 70 years of the Hastings Writers' Group.  We had a delicious cake shaped to resemble what most of our writing desks look like, a fantastic buffet and awards were presented.  The 70th Anniversary book project, Imagine That! sold enough copies to donate money to charities: Dragonflies, Charity for Kids and The Oliver Curd Trust.  The Catherine Cookson cup was presented to Amanda Giles by our guest judge, Thorne Ryan.  The Writer of the Year award was presented by our patron Tamara McKinley to joint winners Roz Balp and Diana Lock.