Announcement of the winners of the fifth World Writing Championship

The fifth edition of the World Writing World is over. With thousands of participants from all over the world, this independent initiative organized by Santiago llach is an online writing competition that takes place every three months and whose main objective is to encourage the habit of writing and editing among peers.

After two intense weeks of prose writing (and one poetry class of your choice), the participants’ texts and poems were read by three rounds of pre-jurors and jurors, who defined the winning teams, the poems and the prose texts in each category. : general, adolescents and children. Also, in this edition, the marker price was added to the person who achieved, on average, the most characters written per day.

General Category

The jury composed of Amy fusselman (United States), Lina Meruane (Chile) and Jorge Volpi (Mexico) defined the winning texts in the general category, as well as the public vote.

The individual winner was the Colombian Alexandre molano, the striker of this category the Venezuelan Pauline Noriega, and the winning team, Bulgarian @ s, has its members spread throughout the city of Buenos Aires and its surroundings. The winning team is defined taking into account the efficiency (what percentage of its members wrote at least 3000 characters per day) and the score obtained by the finalist texts and poems.

Molano’s winning text, “The wind in the attic”, is for Jorge Volpi “a text with force and direction, well resolved, which subtly traces the consequences of violence and powerlessness”. Alejandro is 41 years old, he is from Tunja, Colombia, and has worked in the book and library sector, leading reading and writing projects in his country.

Second place in the general prose category went to Soledad Brea with “Opposite by the top”. Lina Meruane describes it as “the beautiful and hard story of a trip to the past and a regret in the present; simple in appearance, each sentence becomes a hammer on the conscience, and as it progresses its painful complexity is revealed ”. Soledad is 32 years old, is a biotechnologist and molecular biologist, has a doctorate in biological sciences and is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at CONICET.

The third place in this category was for the text “August was a wasteland”, by Jose silberman, a 51-year-old engineer born in La Pampa who started writing with the World Cups. His team, Cardumen, was a finalist in this edition of the World Cup. In addition to José, they are part of the team Facundo Landivar, Yael Rosenfeld, Miguel Arrondo, Lucila Goldin, Leonardo d’Espósito, Alejandra patricia diaz, Maria Fernanda Bertero, Marisa Dettori and Gustavo Aspitia.

The runner-up team in the general category was School, composed of participants from Montevideo (Uruguay), Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Corrientes (Argentina). Third place went to Phoenix Foundation, composed of participants from Buenos Aires, Córdoba, San Luis and Corrientes.

The top scorer in the overall category was Pauline Noriega, with an average of 32,627 characters per day during the two weeks of prose writing. Paolina lives in the city of Cumaná, Venezuela, and ends her theater career at the National Experimental University of the Arts (UNEARTE).

Teen Category

The teens category also had its three winners. The jury, composed of Ana Catania, Maria José Navia and Julia moret, first chose the text “Recipe for quarantine”, from Valerie Deluca (17). For Navia, “we go into the text thinking that we are going to read a recipe that will be played in a narrative way, but it is so much more. Over the lines, the story grows: there is a handful of infinity here ”.

Valeria is 17 years old, she is a Maschwitz engineer and is in her final year of high school and, at the same time, begins a literary career. “I discovered the World Cup thanks to social networks, thanks to an acquaintance who also writes poems. The experience was difficult, because in general my writing times are longer, and they depend a lot on what I write ”.

Second place went to Pablo Ontivero (16) with the text “Diary of two cohabitants” in which, for Ana Catania, “the precision of prose coexists with the ethereal of poetry, thus obtaining a charming result. The characters unfold in their singularity”. Abyss “, by Juliette Arena (18 years old), student of the Writing Arts career, got third place. For María José Navia, it is “a story that manages to transform beauty into fear. Brutal”.

In this category, the marker was Milca palomino, with an average of 70,950 characters per day. Milca is 14 years old, lives in Irapuato, Mexico, and is passionate about reading: “With this contingency I became in love with books, I couldn’t stop reading them. I started writing when I didn’t like the end of the stories I was reading. “

Poetry

Tess Gallagher (United States), Monica Grande (Mexico) and Piedad Bonnett (Colombia), with the vote of the public, defined the winners of the week of poetry. “The bats”, by Lucila Hernandez, got the first place. Lucila was born in 1979, lives in Buenos Aires and is a poet. Participation in literary workshops with Marcos de Soldati and coordinates reading circles for women. For Gallagher, through the poem “the reader is invited to take off from the ground and to fly at the end of the poem, which amounts to assuming a supreme power of this once terrifying being: the bat”.

Piedad Bonnett agrees that the power of the poem occurs towards the end, “which totally resignifies it, and shows a tremendous ability to connect the seemingly distant (the bat seen through cold internet data) with the intimate, using the sleep resource ”. For Mónica Nepote, it is a poem “well constructed, mysterious and well resolved, it borders on the narrative although it does not allow itself to be proposed as a poetic object which in the economy of its language or the precision of its structure makes everyone cut distends a cutting effect -dynamite “.

Second place went to “Lost”, from Matías Rivarola. Matías was born in 1980 in the Chaco, studied social communication at the National University of the Northeast and participated in anthologies of stories. The third place for poetry was obtained by “Will”, from Paula Page. Paula lives in Benavídez, Buenos Aires, is 51 years old and is a publicist, editor and graduate in editorial management.

Children category

The jury – composed of Ignatius Martinez (Uruguay), Llanos Campos Martínez (Spain) and Chanti (Argentina) – defined three winners. Among the texts of players aged 6 to 9, the first place goes to “What are wolves eating?” Camila Besteiro. For Llanos Campos, “from the classic stories, the author (I think) gives a twist to the already known stories and raises some interesting things that have to do with the correction to which these times are leading us, the search for your place in the world, second chances and overcoming prejudices ”. Camila is 6 years old and lives in La Plata; He’s in his sophomore year and says that while the World Cup experience was challenging for him, he also had a lot of fun.

In the sub-category of 10 and 11 year olds, the text “Library complaints”, for Augusto Clement, got the first place. Augusto is from Rosario and is 11 years old. He is in fifth grade and his favorite characters are Natacha de Luis Pescetti, Francisco de Andrea Ferrari, Ruperto’s toad from Roy Berocay and Gerónimo Stilton from Elizabeth dami. For Ignacio Martínez, Augusto’s text is a “beautiful, original, daring, imaginative story. The idea that the characters in some stories spend time in others is really very inspiring for countless creations ”.

Finally, in the sub-category of children aged 12 and 13, the text “El bulletin”, for Olivia naiderman, got the first place. Olivia is 12 years old, she lives in Buenos Aires with her mother, father, younger sister and a cat. “I love reading a lot and my dream is a wall-to-wall bookcase so high it touches the ceiling,” says Olivia. For Chanti, Olivia’s story concerns an “original proposal written in the form of a note from the teaching staff of a school to Lucifer’s parents. It’s surprising and funny because of this mix between the everyday and the demonic ”.

The winning team in the children category was Animaletras, integrated with Juana Valentina Escalante Vidal (ten), José Altamirano (ten), Benjamin Fiochetta (ten), Eugenie Diaz (ten), Jana Calderon (ten), Thiago Molina (11), Florencia Tillar (11), Delfina Tornello (10) and Lautaro tello (6). The second place went to the team The Grimm and the third for Whomping willows, a group of students from the city of Funes, Santa Fe.

All the winning and finalist texts can be read on https://mundialdeescritura.com/.

On October 20, registration begins for the sixth edition (and the third this year!) And, this time, the places and spaces will be the protagonists of the writing proposals. Unlike previous editions, the writing stage will last a week and participants will have more time to edit and correct their texts and, as always, the writing will be accompanied by a cycle of lectures and virtual workshops with writers from different parts of the world. . . .

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