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It is our pleasure to announce the official national winners of the 2014 Bulgarian Creative Writing Competition! All regional finalist essays were read and assessed on Saturday, March 22rd, by our panel of seven native speakers and Bulgarian professionals – Galina Nikolova, Gergana Paraskova, Darina Konova, Erika Erickson, Stanislava Milanova, Michelle Fedor and Vladimir Mihailovski. To say the least, the competition was fierce and the talent impressive! Check the results at 2014 National Results There are 21 winners – 3 per grade level – and these students, as well as their English teachers (1 per school), will be invited to attend the official BCWC awards ceremony in Blagoevgrad on April 26, 2014. This trip is just one part of the prizes that will be awarded to the winners. Schools and winners will be contacted individually at a later time in order to coordinate the logistics for the event. This year we also have three special awards – two for participants from private schools that participated independently of ranking and one award granted by our team. Once again, congratulations to all! The winning essays will be unveiled for all to read on the BCWC website by the end of this month in a PDF format. In April, after the awards ceremony, they will be also available for download as an ebook. Stay tuned!

Who are this year’s national qualifiers? Check the list! 2014 Regional Results Some interesting statistics from this year’s competition: Participants registered – 5500 Essay submitted – 4000 Schools participating – 180 Regions with the highest number of participants – Plovdiv – 502, city of Sofia – 346, Blagoevgrad, Varna and Burgas – 200. Regions with the highest number of national qualifiers – Plovdiv – 24, city of Sofia – 11, and Burgas and Varna – 8. Schools with the highest number of national qualifiers – „Plovdiv” Language School in Plovdiv, 4th Foreign Language School „Frederic Joliot-Curie“ – Varna, „Geo Milev“ Language School – Burgas, and „Yordan Radichkov“ Language School – Vidin. Most popular topics among national qualifiers – You are a tree–tell your life story; Choose any two items (not people) in the room and write a conversation between them; When socks disappear, where do they go?; Imagine that you have a full-length mirror that talks to you. What does it say?; Is the fish mute or does it not speak because it knows everything?; You are an alien invader. Explain why you have chosen to either take over Earth or leave it as it is; One day you wake up and find that you can read people’s minds.

More than 4000 students from 6th through 12th grade from 180 schools took part in the fourth national creative writing competition in English on February 11th and 12th 2014. This year students wrote on topics like: You are a tree–tell your life story, You open your freezer and find that it has become a passage to the North Pole…., If you had to do without one of your five senses, which would it be, and why?, When socks disappear, where do they go?, If rain was a person, what sort of person would it be?, If you could be attractive and stupid or intelligent and ugly which would you prefer and why?, How can you live life without regret? In the writing statistics form teachers shared with us that “the students found the topics challenging and intriguing” and they “had a lot of fun”. On February 22 and 23 the essays will be read and assessed by four regional juries – two in Sofia, one in Plovdiv and one Blagoevgrad. The top four essays from each grade level from each region (112 in total) will progress to the round of national judging which will take place in Sofia on 22 March. The 112 national qualifiers will be announced by the end of February and the 21 winning national essays – by March 28. The national awards ceremony will be held on April 26.

We are glad to announce that as of today we have 124 schools with almost 3500 participants registered for BCWC 2014. As the deadline for registration is December 20, most probably we will beat our last year’s record. We will send an email to all schools confirming their registration by December 20. This year we got a few inquiries from private schools regarding their participation in the competition. So far they were not eligible to participate due to the fact that the curriculum in the private schools provides more English classes per week than the one in the regular municipality and state schools. Thus, private school students are at an advantage in terms of opportunities to study the language, which often discourages other institutions from entering. At the same time, we realize that the students at private schools would also benefit from participation in different competitions together with other students. In this regard, we are willing to take steps towards opening the competition to everyone from next year onward. Unfortunately, we cannot change the rules this year, but what we can offer is to accept private schools students’ essays independently of ranking. Our judges will read them (and select some essays of distinction, with certificates of merit for any top essays selected) but they will not advance further to the national level of competition. Private schools willing to participate independently of ranking are welcome to register by December 20th.

On November 15th CORPluS hosted a party for friends and supporters and raised money for the upcoming 4th Bulgarian Creative Writing Competition. Great people for a great cause! We are looking forward to a successful BCWC season!

Thank you for your interest in Bulgarian Creative Writing Competition 2014! You can register your school here. Note that the link will be active from December 2nd to December 20th, 2013