2025 Contest Result.
Welcome to the celebration page of the 2025 The Mortals Writing Contest!
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The Contest was a celebration of language, imagination, and voice. Over the past year, writers from different Basis Schools submitted work that challenged conventions, highlight innovations, and demonstrated exceptional craft. This page honors the winners whose writing stood out for its originality, depth, and emotional power. We are proud to celebrate these voices and to recognize the creativity and dedication behind each winning piece.
Argumentative Writing
First Prize
Grace Liu
“You raise a clear, original question that many students recognize immediately, and you build your argument in a logical, step-by-step way. The opening classroom scenario is effective: it grounds the essay in lived experience and naturally leads into a broader discussion about rules, fairness, and the different purposes of school and home. Your central claim that schoolwork and chores serve fundamentally different functions remains consistent throughout the essay, which gives the piece coherence and clarity”
Journalistic Writing
First Prize
Nancy Li
“For its ambitious, empathetic story that illuminates social erasure and human resilience through grounded characters and controlled, affecting prose.”
Creative Writing
First Prize
Fiona Fan
“For its ambitious, empathetic story that illuminates social erasure and human resilience through grounded characters and controlled, affecting prose.
Second Prize
William Zhang
“For its masterful control over pace and emotionally charged storytelling. A graceful and vivid journey that imposes the weight of time through grief, loss, and reunion, true.”
Third Prize
Shelwin Ding
For a rare, elegant voice that marries precise, evocative detail with philosophical depth; a beautifully crafted meditation on identity and memory that stays with the reader.
First Runner-up
Abigail Liang
“Utilizing an engaging fantasy allegory about produce to explore compelling themes of social status, prejudice, and the meaning of family and acceptance, tying them together coherently with vivid and compelling prose. Your work, though seemingly banal to the lazy eye, dives deeply into the emotional aspect of competition. The ending, while heartwarming, relies slightly too heavily on direct dialogue to communicate the emotional resolution; incorporating more action or sensory detail in the final scene would make the adoption feel more earned and impactful. ”
Argumentative Writing
First Prize
"Sable"
“For its sly devotion to the small, domestic miracle, staging a quiet resurrection with the exactness of a scientist and the tenderness of a lullaby. What begins as an ordinary Tuesday becomes a moral and imaginative experiment in revival: the ember that “remembers wings” is an arresting conceit, and you sustain that conceit with surprising, particular images until the poem’s rebirth feels earned rather than theatrical.”
Second Prize
Makayla Zhong
“For its austere intelligence and its capacity to turn procedural language into a moral instrument. The poem reads as a classified dossier rendered in verse: clipped, acid, and unflinching. Its formal constraints, parenthetical alternatives, slashed syntax, elliptical gestures, function as rhetorical scalpel and witness, revealing how institutional prose buries culpability while personal voice insists on restitution.”
Third Prize
Ethan Xie
“For its mythic compression and its ferocious devotion to recurrence. This poem operates as an incantation: language thickens, repeats, and bruises itself until endurance becomes a physical property of the lines. The hawthorn is not merely observed but inhabited, rendered as an organism of memory, injury, and seasonal return, carrying human persistence without ever collapsing into allegory.