Orwell Youth Prize: Hockerill Anglo-European College student Winter Docx, 14, one of two winners in Years 7-9 category
A Bishop’s Stortford student has won a prestigious national writing competition.
Winter Docx, 14, was one of two winners of the Orwell Youth Prize 2025 in the Years 7-9 category. The competition is named after English writer, critic and journalist George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm.
The Year 9 pupil at Hockerill Anglo-European College wrote a fiction piece entitled A Crimson Portrait. Entrants to the competition, run by The Orwell Foundation, were invited to write in any form on the subject, “Freedom is...”
Winter’s story follows a Sudanese painter who flees civil war in his home country, painting portraits for tourists in Egypt, before working in London as a delivery driver.
She said: “One of my English teachers, Mrs Dalglish, was brilliant at getting us all to think about writing stories. Her enthusiasm has been invaluable. And it has been amazing to win the Orwell Youth Prize! I still can’t believe it. It’s such an honour and it was so interesting to go the ceremony in London and see all the writers there.”
She receives a £100 cash prize, a certificate and the complete works of Orwell from Penguin Books, and another set for the school. Winners are also published in The Orwell Prize Anthology, alongside the winning entries from The Orwell Prizes for books and journalism.
Richard Blair, George Orwell’s son and founding patron of the foundation, presented the prizes. This is the first year youth awards were given alongside the adult prizes.
Winter described her entry as a “story of displacement, loss and the eventual reclamation of freedom”.
She explained: “It follows a Sudanese painter who fled from Kauda to London during the Sudanese civil wars. For a time during this journey, he survived by painting portraits of tourists in Luxor in Egypt. He now works as a parcel delivery driver in and around London.
“The story starts on his first day off after two weeks. He realises that, though thankful for his freedom, he has not in fact been living freely at all; rather, he is continually haunted by those he has loved and lost.
“His route back to freedom – back to allowing himself to feel again – is through painting. At the end of the story, he picks up his brush.
“I knew that I wanted to focus on emotional honesty and to emphasise and explore the inner life of people who are not usually noticed. But the story itself just seemed to come from nowhere when I was writing it.
“Now I think about it, though, probably the inspiration was some subconscious combination of lots of things: giving directions to a lost delivery person who was having a bad day, really enjoying writing about colour and light and painting, a news story about the Valley of The Kings and reading The Outsider by Camus.”
The Orwell Foundation is a charity that exists to “promote Orwell’s values of bravery, integrity, decency and fidelity to truth”. It says: “We share George Orwell’s vision of a decent society where thought is free, truth is valued and brave writing is celebrated.”
The Youth Prize aims to support the next generation of socially engaged young writers. It received 1,476 entries for the three secondary school categories: Years 7-9, 10-11 and 12-13, featuring poetry, short stories, journalism, essays and game design.
Winter’s teacher Pieta Dalglish said: “Winter is keen to pursue a career in writing and we’re thrilled that she has, at this early stage, got the recognition she so richly deserves.”
