ABOUT
WriteSpace is an initiative of The Kartik Foundation, created to give young people from all backgrounds the time, space and confidence to develop their creative writing. We bring students from independent and maintained schools together in workshops led by professional writers and practitioners, in an inclusive and inspiring atmosphere.
What began as a single partnership with Westminster School has grown into a network. WriteSpace now runs in collaboration with Westminster, St Paul's, Alleyn's, and with the Ark schools network — reaching students across more than fifty London schools and roughly the 11–16 age range.
Expertly Crafted Sessions
WriteSpace is built around a series of creative writing workshops designed to introduce students to fresh ideas, share the craft of writers working in different forms, and ultimately give participants a space to produce their own work. Sessions blend insight from established voices in poetry, prose, journalism and drama with the support of English teaching staff at our partner schools.
Read more on the Calendar page.
A shared space across schools
WriteSpace runs as several parallel strands, each anchored to a partner school and the state-school network it works with. At Westminster, students share the workshops with their Platform+ peers. At St Paul's and Alleyn's, the model is the same, with each independent school's pupils writing alongside the state-school students from its outreach network. The Ark strand brings together students from across Ark's London academies. Within each strand, students from very different school environments share the same room, the same writers, and the same inspiration — and discover that the writing life isn't reserved for a particular kind of student or a particular kind of school.
The Spark Awards
To celebrate the writing produced through the programme, at home, and in students' own time — every WriteSpace year culminates in the Spark Awards. The prize currently runs in two regional streams: one for students in the Westminster Platform+ cohort, and one for students across the Ark network. Both streams accept prose, poetry, drama and non-fiction, and both are judged by panels that include academics, English department leads and members of The Kartik Foundation team.
Read more on the Spark Awards page.
Our partners
WriteSpace exists thanks to the schools, organisations and publishers that share its mission. Our current partners include Westminster School (and the Platform+ programme), St Paul's School, Alleyn's School, the Ark schools network, the National Theatre, and Pushkin Press, who generously donate books for our prize-winners.
Read more on the Partners page.
