The three winners in the seventh edition of the Sunday Herald short story competition conducted by Deccan Herald received their awards at a function held at the Bangalore Club here on Friday.

Rohith Rajagopal, a software professional, clinched the first prize of Rs 30,000 for his story ‘War of words.’ T S Ronnie, an advertising professional, won the second prize of Rs 25,000 for her story ‘Cobwebs’. Akshara Gopalan’s story, ‘Writers Block’, won the third prize of Rs 15,000.

K N Tilak Kumar, Editor, Deccan Herald, gave away the awards.

With around 500 entries coming in this year, the task of shortlisting the entries and choosing the winners was a difficult task, said the judges.

Stanley Carvalho, Andaleeb Wajid and Lakshmi Palecanda were the judges of the competition.

“We judged the stories based on language, storyline, plots, character and creativity.

 It was a wonderful experience overall,” Palecanda said. While Rohith’s story has words as characters and their conversations, Ronnie has written an introspective piece and reaction of a male protagonist’s reaction towards a simple thing such as peanut sweet.

 “The story has three parts – nostalgic, contemporary and the final one is strong and concludes with why the protagonist has such a reaction. This contest has provided me a great platform and I plan to write more in the coming days,” said Ronnie.

Akshara, a college student currently pursuing Bachelor of Liberal Arts at Symbiosis Institute, Pune, could not attend the function. However, her proud mother Srividya Gopalan collected the prize on her daughter’s behalf.