10th April 2019
To celebrate Sibling's Day, we caught up with identical twins Maddie and Bee Halladay.
The passionate pair left St Brendan's in 2015, having both studied English Literature, English Language and History, as well as completing their EPQ's. We are so proud of all they have achieved since leaving us and look forward to working with them more in the future. Here's their post-St Brendan's story so far....
Maddie and Bee
'After leaving St. Brendan’s, we went on to study English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham, and graduated with identical first class degrees. In our final year we created, organised, and chaired an event called ‘Writing YA’, where six prominent Young Adult authors shared their craft and publishing advice. It was the first student-run event of its kind to take place at the university.
Simultaneously to writing our dissertations, we entered a competition run by Simon & Schuster, submitting our co-authored young adult novel in progress. From August 2017 to March 2018, we made it through the first page, first three chapters and full draft stages, ultimately coming second out of hundreds of entries and receiving a professional edit letter. We’re currently working on the third draft of the project, preparing to query agents by the end of this year.
We set up our YouTube channel the same month we started at St. Brendan’s in 2013. While we were there, we reached our first 1,000 subscriber milestone. Now, we have over 10,000 subscribers and continue to work with publishers, such as Walker Books, Scholastic and Hachette, to promote and review their new YA titles.'
We look back at our St Brendan's experience as our best academic years!
You can subscribe to Maddie and Bee's YouTube channel by clicking here.
