Photo by Hamish MacLean
Cecile Kruger (12), of Stirling School, has been awarded the Elsie Locke Memorial Trust award for her short story Close to the Edge.
The national award has been offered annually since 2009 to pupils in year 7 or 8, to commemorate the celebrated New Zealand author's passion for peace, the environment, women's issues and community.
The late writer's daughter, Maire Leadbeater, said Cecile's writing showed ''a degree of empathy for suffering in a situation unusual for such a young person''.
Close to the Edge was Cecile's response to this year's theme, ''water''.
The poetic allegory, which she described as a narrator ''lost in a desert, looking for water'', will appear in the School Journal this year.
