A joint love of writing and pets has resulted in an award for Tarneit schoolgirl Samiha Rukayat.
The year 6 student at Al Taqwa College in Truganina, recently took out the fiction prize in RSPCA Victoria’s ‘Pawsome Stories’ competition.
“It feels good,” said the 12 year old of her win.
“Like I never expected that I would have won this award. I’m just very happy and proud of myself.”
After developing a love of writing in year 1, Samiha entered a number of writing awards without success.
Her one page story about her cat Saaf was selected as the winner of the CEO Award for fiction by the ’Pawsome Stories’ judging panel which was this year made up of authors Melissa Keil, Cameron Macintosh and Sally Rippin.
While Saaf is a real life cat, the adventures she has in Samiha’s story certainly aren’t,
“She was going to save the world because there is going to be a tornado, so she snuck onto a ship while people tried to convince her not to set sail because there was going to be a storm coming,” explained Samiha of what Saaf gets up to.
“And then she got into the water to get an orb that was causing all the chaos and then she just destroyed it. And that was like how she saved the world from the storm.”
Unsurprisingly, Samiha is a fan of fantasy novels, with Wonder by RJ Palacio her favourite.
She hopes to one day emulate her.
“I want to be an author when I grow up and write some bestselling novels.”
