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QE boys took the honours at a literature quiz, comfortably beating all the other schools in the competition.

QE entered two teams in the North London heat of the Kids’ Lit Quiz and, by half-way through the contest, they were competing closely for the lead, while standing some eight points ahead of the third-placed team.

English teacher Alex Ulyet said: “They held on to this right until the end and the only question was whether the Year 7 or Year 8 team would clinch the top spot, but Year 8 nudged in front by about two points.

“On the day both teams were fantastic. We were a little worried at first as it seemed every other table was celebrating every question they got right, whilst the two QE teams stayed relatively silent. This was, however, clearly just their calm, composed natures!”

The quiz heat at Queenswood School in Hatfield was part of the nationally run Kids’ Lit Quiz, which aims to test young people’s knowledge of literature. The two groups of four boys had prepared for the event in Monday lunchtime practice sessions overseen by Mr Ulyet and QE Librarian Ciara Murray. They were given questions based on known categories in the Kids’ Lit Quiz. These included, for example, sci-fi, mythology and fish.

Besides their performance in the main competition, the QE boys did extremely well in the bonus questions between rounds, several of them winning book tokens.

“Both teams seemed to really enjoy just being able to revel in their knowledge of children’s and young adult fiction. There was a sense that it left them with an even greater desire to go out and read some of the books which they heard questions about but had not yet read, which is of course the most important thing,” Mr Ulyet added.

The winning Year 8 team comprised: Yashaswar Kotakadi; Leo Dane-Liebesny; Ishaan Mehta and Conall Walker.

The Year 7 runners-up were: Parth Kapadia; Arjun Patel; Ewan Penhale and Siddharth Sridhar.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn paused during election day to publish a new poem by award-winning poet and Old Elizabethan, Anthony Anaxagorou.

Mr Corbyn tweeted a video of Anthony reading aloud the polemical piece, which was commissioned by Labour (see below to read it). The party last night confou nded initial expectations by depriving the Conservatives of their overall majority. He praised the 186-word poem and urged voters to get out to the polling stations: “Powerful words from the poet @Anthony1983 [Anthony Anaxagorou]. Vote before 10pm.”

It is another QE connection for the Labour leader, whose own son, Benjamin, attended the School from 1998 to 2000, albeit against Mr Corbyn’s wishes.

Anthony (OE 1994-1999), whose tweets urged people to vote Labour, was filmed delivering the poem against a red background including the Labour slogan, For the Many, Not the Few.

A rising star of the literary world, Anthony is a poet, publisher and educator, who won the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award, which is given to those who have broken the mould and made a significant contribution to culture and the arts. He recently led a six-week workshop for QE’s Year 9 and 10 pupils as the School’s poet-in-residence.

Last month, in an interview in the Independent, journalist Mattha Busby wrote: “You may not have heard of Anthony Anaxagorou yet, but the wordsmith taking on the establishment is one you’ll want to know.”

Busby highlighted Out-Spoken Press, the poetry press founded by Anthony. “Anaxagorou, like many BAME [Black and Minority Ethnic] poets, didn’t feel like the traditional publishing houses represented the people who looked like him and the kind of poetry he was writing,&rdqu o; Busby wrote.

He interviewed the poet just after Anthony had emerged victorious in a debate at the Oxford Union, where he was speaking against the motion that Kanye West is more relevant than Shakespeare.

The interview recounted how Anthony first wrote a book when he became unemployed. Entitled Difficult Place to be Human, its sales far exceeded expectations, selling 8,000 copies – an impressive figure for a largely unknown poet.

The article recounts his successes as a live performer and his work to establish Out-Spoken Live, as a platform for emerging poets.
Anthony also explained why he had taken a decade-long break from writing soon after winning the inaugural Mayor’s Young Poet award in 2003 – a sensitive teenager, he had been upset when the host of a poetry night in Hampstead made a disparaging remark to him.

Today, Anthony not only manages Out-Spoken and runs school workshops, he is also the father of a two-year-old boy, speaks at universities as a guest lecturer and appears on panels discussing issues such as the under-representation of BAME writers in traditional publishing.

 

Anthony’s poem for Labour:

Food bank queues bloated with ghostly nurses,

Brilliant scholars of tomorrow

Who can’t afford the charge of learning,

Bleak conditions where broken workers

Clutch misery in their hands

Contracted to remain inside a repeating zero.

They waged war on wheelchairs and the weak,

Harming those already harmed,

Cutting those already bleeding,

Secondary school children with bellies empty

As a brownfield site,

Corporate greed wishes to privatise

The last section of sky,

A minimum wage set by a group of suits

Who’ve always had enough,

Now we have had enough,

Awake and electric, we will vote with our lives,

With the plight of others in mind,

As sure as the echo that follows sound,

There will be no more forgetting,

No more ignoring the hand we hold out

Where a vote is not just an x in a box,

It’s a scream, a fist, a march, a cry,

Mark it with life and progress,

Mark it red,

As the blood that drums against our veins

Mark it red,

As vacant phone boxes and city bricks,

Mark it red,

As the colours of a sunrise,

We’ll never forget.

---

 

• • To see Anthony reading it, scroll through Jeremy Corbyn’s twitter feed for 8th June 2017 – https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn

 

A QE team has taken first prize in a local competition designed to test pupils’ knowledge of literature.

 

The five-strong team, all from Year 7, successfully fought off competition from eight other schools to win the 2017 Barnet Kids Lit Quiz. It was QE’s first-ever entry in the Barnet quiz, although the School has won the regional North West London heat of the international Kids Lit Quiz competition for the past two years.

 

The Barnet quiz involved six rounds of questions, including author anagrams, picture clues and trivia about literary award-winners. The QE boys finished five points ahead of the next-placed school, Mill Hill County.

 

They won book tokens as well as a cup, which the School has the right to retain until the competition is run next year.

 

QE Librarian Ciara Murray said: “I’m consistently impressed by the boys’ breadth of knowledge – the questions were really quite tough! Their success bodes well for the regional competition in September.”

 

The team comprised: Abdur-Rahman Ismail, Heemy Kalam, Leo Dane-Liebesny and Vedaangh Rungta and Divyam Shah. Leo was also in the combined Year 7 and 8 team that won the regional competition heat in November 2016.

 

Ms Murray added that, between them, the Barnet competition team have borrowed more than 300 books from The Queen’s Library so far this year, with Divyam single-handedly accounting for 112 of these.

 

The boys trained with English teacher Alex Ulyet and Year 10 pupil librarian Kieran Dhrona on Wednesday lunchtimes, testing their knowledge of a range of books and competing against the Year 8 boys who took part in the regional and national finals of the Kids Lit Quiz last year.

 

In addition to QE and Mill Hill County, the competing schools were The Totteridge Academy, The Compton, St James’ Catholic High, Queen Elizabeth’s Girls’, Copthall, JCoSS and East Barn et.

 

Twelve new pupil librarians have been selected to serve The Queen’s Library, following a rigorous application process against stiff opposition.

The 12 boys appointed have already had their induction session and will soon be trained in how to operate library circulations (loans, renewal and returns) and in how to shelve books. They will also face a programme of other tasks in the course of the year, including taking responsibility for running several of the library&rsq uo;s clubs.

Librarian Ciara Murray said: “I was bowled over by the strength and number of applications this year: those who were ultimately selected should feel very proud of their achievement, and I know they are looking forward to making their mark on the library.”

A total of 60 boys applied for the positions. The process involved writing a letter of application, an interview with Ms Murray and a sorting test to see whether they had a good eye for detail – “Very important for shelving books correctly!”

Among the interesting ideas and innovations proposed during the interviews were interactive, themed displays, quizzes to test obscure book knowledge and a book review club – with extra book-borrowing allowances for reviewers.

Those appointed were:

• • Year 8 boys Ardavan Hamisi, Abdur-Rahman Ismail, Abhi Koria, Yashaswar Kotakadi, Jashwanth Parimi and Benjamin Toze

• • Year 9’s Richard Bai, Swattik Das, Sultan Khokhar and Lev Shafran

• • Ivaan Nigam and Joell Rosil, of Year 10.

The library’s current clubs include a new film club masterminded by Siddhant Kansal, of Year 9, which has proved extremely popular. The group meet weekly to analyse scenes from books that have been adapted into movies and to discuss which they prefer. There is also a burgeoning board-gaming club, overseen by Hector Cooper and Ivin Jose, which gives boys from multiple year groups the chance to exercise their strategic and communication skills.

QE’s 11 existing pupil librarians, two of whom are now entering their fourth year of service (Hector Cooper & Rishi Shah, both of Year 11), will be closely involved in mentoring and training the new members of the team.

“The pupil librarian system has proven to be a really great way of fostering inter-year friendships and teamwork,” Ms Murray added.