HONOURING YOUNG CREATIVE TALENT
WELCOMES FAMOUS FACES AND FUTURE STARS TO BUCKINGHAM PALACE
The Queen joined forces with Hollywood stars Tom Hiddleston, Luke Evans and Hugh Bonneville, as well as former Strictly Come Dancing professional Oti Mabuse, singer Olivia Dean and The One Show’s Alex Jones, among many other big names, to honour the 50 finalists of this year’s BBC 500 Words competition at Buckingham Palace.
The popular annual writing competition, which was launched by DJ Chris Evans in 2011, was postponed during the Covid-19 pandemic, but returned late last year, attracting 44,000 entries from children in two age categories, five to seven and eight to 11.
After the final, Her Majesty told Tom, who read out one of the six overall winning entries: “We’ve had a three-year gap and I never ever thought we were going to bring it back again, but the very kind people at the BBC did listen, thought it was a good idea and here we are.”
The Loki star replied: “It’s extraordinary the quality of the writing and if you think of the number – 44,000 entrants – and how many people will probably continue to write after this.”
The Fast Show star and author of the Young Bond novels Charlie Higson, one of the judges, said of the Queen: “She’s genuinely been a huge supporter of this, really keen on promoting literacy, and it was really down to her that the competition came back – she twisted a few arms and said: ‘This is a really good thing, you’ve got to carry on.’ She played a huge part in it.”
Charlie told HELLO! “It was amazing because it had shut down and gone away and we’d thought it would never happen again. We had meant to have the final here – it would have been in 2020 – and we didn’t. So to bring it back and do it here was just really exciting.”
