Young creatives awards

The Young Creatives Awards competition provides young people aged between 12 to 24 who study, work or live in the Inner West Council area the opportunity to hone their creative skills in a competitive environment and to have their work seen and published. There are two streams in the competition, writing and art.

Young Creatives Awards 2021

The Young Creatives Awards are now open for entries for young people aged between 12 – 24, who study, work or live in the Inner West Council area.

The competition provides young people the opportunity to hone their creative skills in a competitive environment and to have their work seen and published.

There's never been a better time to get creative

With triple the entries of previous years, the standard of work also exceeded all expectations last year. Amongst the winners were design graduates, high school students, art students, and budding young writers- one of whom topped the state in HSC English 2 and caught the interest of a literary agent.

The exhibition of winner and runners-up art and writing was shown at Leichhardt Library. A digital presentation of the winners, runners-up and judges’ statements was also created for the first time in 2020, extending the audience and raising the calibre of the competition through feedback from the incredible judges. View the 2020 digital presentation here.

How to enter

Writing Awards

Submit a piece of writing (1000 words), either a short story, a fan fiction, poetry, review or a piece of prose responding to an item from the Inner west Libraries collection.

Art Awards

Submit a photo of an artwork, (drawing, painting, photography, collage, sculpture) or a digital piece- inspired by or responding to an item from the Inner West Libraries collection.

The art and writing pieces must reference any item from the Inner West Library and History collection. This includes print, CD, DVD, books, magazines as well as every item in our digital collection which encompasses newspapers, magazines, DVDs, audiobooks and digital books and our local history online archives.

View our full collection here
Our local history archives can also be found here (accessed by the right-hand toolbar)

Judges

The Judges are all high profile, award winning Inner West local artists and writers.

Judges in the writing awards for 2021 are Nadia Wheatley and Ursula Dubosarsky.
Judges for the art awards 2021 are painter and drawer Carmel Byrnes and photographer Adrian Cook.

Enter your submissions here

Entries open 1 April 2021.

Categories and prizes

Young Writers Award and Young Artists Award

Open to:

Ages 12-15
Ages 16-18
Ages 19-24

Prizes:

First prize for each age group in each category: $500 cash
Runner-up prize: $250 cash

Closing date for submissions

31 July 2021

View full terms and conditions (PDF 222.1KB)
View full terms and conditions (DOCX 103KB)

Winner Augustine Blue print - 715

2020 Awards

Our 2020 awards closed on 31 July and our award winners have now been announced. We had over 150 entries.

First prize winners received $500 and runners up $250.

The judging panel: Ursula Dubosarsky and Nadia Wheatley for the writing and Dub Leffler and Ronojoy Ghosh for art.

Entrants were asked to submit a piece of writing (1000 words), either a review, a fan fiction, poetry or a piece of prose responding to an item from the Inner west Council Libraries collection or an artwork inspired by or in response to a resource in the Library.

Congratulations to all the winners and runners up and thank you to everyone who took part.