Newcastle Writers Festival logo – stacked, black with outlined yellow box

Competition

Pencil illustration – Story Hunter creative writing program graphic

Story Hunter Schools Writing Competition

Newcastle Writers Festival invites young writers living in the Hunter region to submit to the Story Hunter Schools Writing Competition. The prize seeks to celebrate and encourage the next generation of young writers. Thanks to the generous support of The MacDougall Foundation, cash prizes will be awarded to three winners in each age category. Winners and highly commended writers will also have their work published on the Story Hunter website. The competition is open to writers who will be under 14 (i.e. 13 or younger) on 1 July 2026.

Story Hunter Schools Writing Competition – celebrating young writers in the Hunter region

Age Categories:

  • Under 10 years of age
  • 10-12 years
  • 12-14 years

The winner in each category will receive $200 and a free Story Hunter workshop for their class. The runner-up will receive $100 and the third-placed entrant will receive $50.

Key Dates:

  • Entries open 9:00am AEDT on 1 April 2026.
  • Entries close at 11:59pm AEST on 1 July 2026.
  • Winners will be notified and prizes awarded in August 2026.

Judging Criteria

  • Entries are judged based on the skill of the entrant. Skill is judged for this competition based on both craft and story.
  • The ‘craft’ component includes the entrant’s command of language, their understanding of narrative structure, and their effort to compose a compelling, well-paced story.
  • The ‘story’ component includes the originality of the idea, and whether the content of the story is unique, interesting, and impactful.
  • The judges will not be required to make an award if they do not consider the entries to be of a sufficient standard.

How to Enter

  • Stories should be typed, 1.5 spaced and saved as a .docx or .pdf
  • Check that you meet the entry requirements below and which age category you belong in.
  • Ensure you have permission from your parent or guardian before entering the prize.
  • Please read the competition guidelines CLICK HERE
  • Fill in the competition form and submit your story CLICK HERE
  • Once you’ve clicked submit, entries cannot be changed.
Entry Form
Competition Guidelines

FAQs

What can I write about?
Anything that excites your imagination! The competition is open to all genres and has no required prompt or stimulus. Your story should be prose, not poetry, with a beginning, middle and end. Don’t send us stories with illegal or offensive material.
There is a maximum word limit for each age category: 500 words for under-10s, 1000 words for 10-12s and 2000 words for 12-14s. There is no minimum word count; if you can tell a great story in a small number of words then we want to read it!

To enter the competition you need to live in one of the ten local government (council) areas in the greater Hunter region of NSW, Australia. These are Cessnock, Dungog, Lake Macquarie, Maitland, MidCoast, Muswellbrook, Newcastle, Port Stephens, Singleton and Upper Hunter.

Age categories are defined by the age you are on the last day of the competition (1 July 2026). So, if you turn 12 on 30 June, you should enter the 12-14 category even if you submit early.

The competition will be judged by the Story Hunter team of writers and educators.

Yes, we welcome entries from all young people in the Hunter region. When filling out the entry form, please put “home education” in the field that asks for your school name.

We want to see your own creative ideas on the page, so while you can ask a teacher or parent for feedback or to check for mistakes, the story should be all your work without substantial editing from an adult. As a guideline: feedback is when they say, “I found this sentence confusing, can you change it to make it clearer?”. Editing is when they make the sentence clearer for you by rewriting it in their own words.

Story Hunter is an initiative of Newcastle Writers Festival designed to equip and encourage our next generation of local writers. We run school workshops for grades 3-8, multi-week programs, full-day creative writing masterclasses, and this competition. You can find out more about Story Hunter on our website or by emailing storyhunter@newcastlewritersfestival.org.au