Alexandra Velkova Wins DeLux. Now you do it!

DeLux is the literary competition among students at ACS and the Anglo-American School. It takes place every year, and so it happens that the last few years the winner comes from ACS.

In the 2020-21 edition, the organizers added a poetry writing competition. It took place last December, and received about 30 entries, equally distributed between the two schools. The heads of the Writing Centers at the respective schools read through all of the entries and determined 5 finalists from each ACS and AAS. At that point, an anonymous judge was given the 10 finalists’ poems without any indication of their authors on the page. Being this secretive surely makes things more mysterious and cool, but that is the runner-up desired effect. The real reason the judging is done this way is to avoid any favoritism or bias, and ensure that the entries are judged only on the merit of the work itself.

Based on the merit of her work, the winner of the poetry competition is Alexandra Velkova of the 11th Grade. We would love for you to read her winning portfolio here, and be as impressed as we are.

Back to the present. Currently, submissions are open for the short story competition. By March 29, send your story or piece of literary non-fiction to writingcenter@acsbg.org. Maximum length is 7 A4 pages (Times New Roman, size 12, double-spaced), so look for another venue for your epic novel.

They say that writing is a solitary occupation. If they’re right, the isolation of the past year is a wonderful thing for the entries in this edition of DeLux. We’re looking forward to finding out the name of the winner, after all the secrecy is played out.