Shine news

This week on ‘Ask the Winner,’ I’m talking to Edi Lea, winner of the 2025 award on our topic of the year ‘Leaders of tomorrow,’for her article “How to Start an Authoritarian Regime” – a satirical seven-step guide that made the judging panel fall off their chairs.

“It was really good fun writing it,” Edi recalls. “So fun to write and I hope it was fun to read.”

The article appeared in Exia, the magazine at City of Norwich School that Edi describes as “the pride and joy of our sixth form.” But as Edi explains, getting it there wasn’t easy, not least when you’re also one of the editors.

This week on ‘Ask the Winner,’ I’m talking to Freddie Hayles and Bella Coombes, who transformed their school politics magazine The Eagle from “magazines that basically just looked like Word documents” into something that had their schoolfriends asking “when’s the next edition coming out?”

Freddie served as graphic designer, Bella as editor-in-chief. Together, they reorganised the entire structure of The Eagle – introducing proper application processes, defined roles and thematic organisation across three issues.

This week on ‘Ask the Winner,’ I’m talking to Aditya Jayaram, winner of the 2024 Terry Mansfield Award CBE prize for Tomorrow’s Talent for his work transforming his school magazine Black and White.

When Aditya took over his school’s “flagship publication” at the start of Year 12, it was struggling. “It was a much smaller scale than it once was,” he recalls.

By the end of the year, alongside a great team, he’d transformed it into a proper publication with three editions and a school-wide audience. Then came the Shine Awards recognition – and everything that followed.

This week, ‘Ask the Winner’ features Mabel Lea, winner of the 2023 Editor of the Year award for her school magazine Exia.

Mabel’s story is particularly interesting because she didn’t start from scratch. The magazine was in its second year of existence when she became editor-in-chief.

“The year before, it was being built from nothing, which is an incredible achievement. I wanted to get involved as soon as it became a thing. I did an article and a bit of editing in that first year. I just fell in love with it really. I was so passionate about making something that we as students could express ourselves through in a way that didn’t really exist.”

This week on ‘Ask the Winner,’ I’m talking to Aashi Bains, winner of our ‘student of the year’, the Terry Mansfield Award CBE prize for Tomorrow’s Talent a well as leading the editorial team to wins for Best Magazine, Best Front Cover and Best Printed Publication for The Beacon.

Aashi had been obsessed with working on her school magazine since she was 11 years old.

“I think from a very young age, I was very interested in journalism. I would email any paper, try and just basically write anything. Within my secondary school in Birmingham, there’s an annual school magazine and it’s a pretty big deal. We get this massive notice board in the hall, the editor-in-chief gets her own little picture. I think since joining that school when I was 11, I was thinking, ‘I’m going to be that.’”

Five years later, Aashi got her wish. Here’s her story.

This week on ‘Ask the Winner,’ I’m talking to Eliza Clark, winner of the 2022 Terry Mansfield Award CBE prize for Tomorrow’s Talent and Best Magazine for her school magazine, The Beacon.

“Coming back after Covid, we were quite aware we were in quite a historic year,” Eliza explains. “We just wanted it to be something that really brought people together.” The team – about 12 students including four in the core editorial group – decided to focus on what ‘beacon’ really means: “that symbol of light and hope.”

They put their school building on the front cover. “Because we had so many lockdowns and did so much of the work remotely from each other, that made the actual school building itself quite important to us as kind of a lighthouse.”