KOCHI, India, 26 January 2008 — Winnie J. Panicker, a former student of International Indian School in Dammam, won the first Student Poet Award instituted by Bluemango Books for her anthology of poems titled “Flowers on the Violin,” the noted literary critic and CEO of Bluemango Books M.K. Harikumar announced during a press conference.
The award consists of a citation plaque and 100,000 rupees, which will be presented to her at a colorful function scheduled for April. The panel of judges included some prominent Indo-Anglican writers from Kerala.
Winnie J. Panicker is now a graduate student of visual media studies at Thiruvananthapuram Mar Ivaniyos College. Her first collection of poems, “Loveliness of Dawn,” was published while she was a Class X student at the Dammam school.
She was actively associated with Pallikkoodam literary fraternity along with her father Shashi Panicker who is working in Dammam.
Her friends and teachers from Dammam remember her fondly.
A former teacher Sarina Riyasudeen, herself a writer and activist of Pallikkoodam, recalls: “Winnie was not much of an extrovert but was quite popular as her poems regularly appeared on the school magazine. I am not amazed by her achievement as I considered her a student with a lot of literary talent.”
Harikumar said during the press conference that Winnie was selected from nearly 200 entries. No award was declared for the story category, as there was none worth the recognition among the entries received. The awards are instituted to motivate and recognize budding talents among student writers in English all over the world.
