Education minister awards high school students from Adana and Gaziantep for short stories on EU values

The creativity and imagination of Turkish high school students took center stage today as Minister of National Education Hüseyin Çelik announced the three winners of the EU story competition. They are among more than 1,000 young people across Turkey who were trained by renowned Turkish authors to prepare for the contest.

The European Commission’s Delegation to Turkey organised the competition to inspire young Turks to write about the founding values of the EU.

The winners are:

• First Place: Dilan Yaman, Mehmet Özöncel Anatolian High School, Adana, for her story “Captivity at the Peak”
• Second Place: Yunus Emre Yıldız, Mehmet Özöncel Anatolian High School, Adana, for his story “Migration Road”
• Third Place: Sonay Tepe, Fitnat Nuri Tekerekoğlu Anatolian High School, Gaziantep, for her story “Waters of Friendship”.
• Honourable mentions went to Aysegül Merve Sağ from Antalya Anatolian High School and Gülçin Koç from the Anatolian Fine Arts High School in Edirne.

The three winners will be invited to a one-week trip to Paris and Brussels, where they will meet with EU representatives and young European authors. The short stories produced by the winners and finalists will be published in a book and translated into English, French and German.

In their speeches at the ceremony, Mr. Çelik and Deputy Head of Delegation Tibor Varadi emphasised the importance of conveying values like freedom, solidarity and equality to younger generations.

The story competition was organised for the second time by the EU Information Relays, a network of 14 centres across Turkey set up in cooperation with local chambers of trade to inform the Turkish public about the EU.