Culture & Education | Wednesday 10 April, 2019 2:30 am |

To discover and nurture UAE’s young talents, the 11th Sharjah Children's Reading Festival (SCRF 2019), is bringing an exciting line-up of edutainment, literature and cultural competitions for school goers. These will include poetry recitation, short story writing, and filmmaking contests.    

Organised by the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA), the event will take place at Expo Centre Sharjah, April 17–27, under the theme - ‘Explore Knowledge’.

‘I am the Narrator’, is a short story competition for creative writing in both Arabic and English. The first position award has been set as AED 4,000, while second and third place-winners will receive AED3,000 and AED2,000, respectively. Winning stories will be published on the festival’s website.

‘Poetry Knight’ is cultural competition dedicated to young Arab poetic talents. The competition aims to teach them reciting and public performance techniques, and seeks to encourage them to engage with Arabic language poems. First-, second-, and third-place winners will receive AED 3,000, AED2,000 and AED1,000, respectively.  

‘Festival Memories’ will put young filmmaking enthusiasts to test. The challenge is to film a short documentary about their festival visit. The three winners of the contest will take home cash prizes worth AED 4,000, AED 3,000 and AED 2,000, and their winning shorts will be put up on all of SCRF’s social accounts.

 

A daily report-writing competition will run throughout the festival’s duration. The task will be to write a report that addresses any SCRF 2019 seminar a student attended. The best daily report will win a laptop.

SCRF is one of the most important cultural events dedicated to children in the UAE and greater Arab region. It has gone beyond just a book exhibition and developed into an integrated event that contributes to enriching the knowledge of visitors with science and literature, while ensuring the participation of organisations and centres dedicated to children.