Tyger Writing Challenge: Help to Re-make the Tyger for the 21st Century!
Calling all creative young writing Tygers!
Inspired by an ambitious and collaborative outreach project involving London Zoo, Kids Company, and the Blake Society, this writing project aims to explore and re-imagine what the Tyger means to us in the 21st Century.
Writers might like to explore for example what meeting the tigers meant to the children at Kids Company, encountering these powerful and enigmatic animals for the first time – how they might be seen either as a symbol of survival and resilience, or perhaps as the form of their anxieties, anger, and energy, finding in these extraordinary and mysterious creatures some reflection of themselves: beautiful, fierce and vulnerable.
Or you could write about any aspect of the 21st Century Tiger – now both a dangerous and an endangered species, and one that still raises profound questions about what sort of world throws up both predators and protectors, and how something so beautiful can also be so deadly.
Blake’s original poem was also about the act of creation itself: by contributing to ‘Tyger Tiger’ you will also be helping to re-shape and forge a new form for the Tiger for the 21st Century!
A selection of the entries will be collated in a special illustrated ‘Tyger Tyger’ booklet that will appear on the Blake Society website. Entrants must be 25 or under, and can submit as many poems as they like. The closing date is 31st March 2015 and the booklet will be announced on 29th July 2015, World Tiger Day. Please send all poems and enquiries to: secretary@blakesociety.org
Good luck!
For more information about the challenge please go to:
To help kick-start the challenge, author Rod Tweedy has written this poem, inspired by the outreach event with Kids Company:
