A talented group of pupils from Axe Valley Academy have become published authors, before they've even taken their GCSEs!

The Year 8 and 9 students worked with a team of volunteer writers, creating characters and weaving words into worlds for 10 weeks, honing their skills and finally settling on the stories that they wanted to tell.  

They drafted, edited and polished their stories with the help of writing specialists from The Bank of Dreams and Nightmares, a young people's writing charity based in Bridport.

Ed Swift from The Bank said, 'We began this project with this fantastic group of young authors and a simple, broad theme of: "Change".

'At a time in their lives when these students are living and coping with change at a furious rate, they are uniquely placed to explore this idea, so we asked them to think about what the concept of 'change' meant to them. We started by removing the idea of an event - whatever it was that caused the change itself, and instead we started looking at outcomes. Seeing the ripples on the pond inevitably made you wonder who, or what, threw the stone. The stories these students produced from these initial ideas are just astounding!'

The pupils then got to work on their own narratives. And the variety of ideas they came up with was amazing. Each story had to have, at its heart, a fundamental change to the life or the outlook of the protagonist. But where those changes come from and the affect those changes have in the stories, are always unexpected. Sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious, often heart-rending. 

Now the stories are finished, published and ready to unleash on a waiting world. The anthology, "Stories from The Valley" will be officially launched at the Axminster Community Waffle House at 6pm on Monday 30th October.

The authors will be available for readings, signings and photos and the evening promises to be a fitting celebration of these amazing new talents.