Scarlett | Masterton, Wairarapa

“I went away on a writing camp, and I was really nervous and there was no-one I really knew. But this girl came up to me and we instantly just started talking, and so it was quite nice that she had the confidence to come and talk to me. 

It’s quite nice to just go out of your comfort zone to go and make someone else feel better. And I think it’s really important, because if you’re not kind, then I don’t know, it’s just not a nice place to live, and be.

It was school-organised, it was just kind of something I put my hand up to do. A couple of years ago, I won a book thing that I submitted, and so I’ve kind of just put forward to everything now. 

It was really just out of a personal thing I was going through, like a hard time and so I wrote about it, and then it turned out that it was quite good. My mum and father went through a divorce, and then my father went to London, and just kind of left me and didn’t say goodbye. So, that was quite upsetting, it was hard, yeah. But we all got through the hard times, and it was fine.

I grew up in Wellington. We moved to Masterton when I was six, and I enjoy doing lots of sports, and that’s why we kind of came up here, because cycling is more safe up here than down in Wellington.”