Prize-Giving Ceremony

On Thursday 28^th April this year, we celebrated the prize-giving ceremony for the 14^th year of the St. Paul’s International Literary Prize and the guest speaker was Carme Riera, the well-known novelist whose literary work has received several awards.

 

Over the years, advances in technology have brought about changes which have affected the organisation of our competition.

 

In the first year of the competition 14 years ago, no-one at all participated by e-mail and this year no-one has done so by post, a revolution in communication!   Our first prize-winner was from Argentina and we asked him to prepare a video recording for the ceremony which was delivered to St. Paul’s by courier. Several years later, we substituted the video tape for a video file which could be sent by e-mail. This year we held a live video conference with our winners from the USA.

 

Not long ago, the competition invitations were sent by post, more than 3,000 letters in total. This year, all communication was handled digitally and the competition was advertised on Google Ad Words with an amazing result of 650 entries which was more than double those received the year before.

 

Our literary competition is trilingual, multicultural and stimulates a passion for literature. It is also an example of how technology is revolutionizing communication.