The Queen praised "brilliant" young writers as they visited Buckingham Palace - after first taking a tour of the Evening Standard offices.
Camilla met the winners and runners-up of the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay competition on Thursday, saying the 140-year-old contest, had brought "communities across the Commonwealth closer together".
This year's participants in the world's oldest international writing competition for schools, aged between 11 and 17 from India and Malaysia, were asked to write on the subject of "a youth-powered Commonwealth".
Extracts from the winners' essays were read out at the palace by literary figures and actors including Dame Joanna Lumley, Sir Ben Okri and Sanjeev Bhaskar.
During her speech, avid reader Camilla described how Queen Victoria was also a "passionate lover of literature".
"She was particularly fond of the works of many authors, including Jane Austen, Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte and Lewis Carroll.
"Legend has it that, having admired Alice In Wonderland, the Queen wrote to Lewis Carroll to request first editions of any of his other books.
"By return of post she received a copy of his Syllabus Of Plane Algebraic Geometry. Probably not what she was after," the Queen said.
Praising the entrants, Camilla said: "Well done to each and every one of you, you are quite brilliant and I have, as ever, enormously enjoyed reading your entries."
Senior winner Siddhi Deshmukh, 17, from Mumbai, and junior winner Shreeya Sahi, 12, from Panchkula in India, visited the Standard newsroom on Wednesday alongside runner ups Yon Sin Kong,15, from Johor in Malaysia and Mitali Ragtah, 11, from New Delhi.
They took a tour of the Standard led by editor emeritus Doug Wills, who also gave them a walk through the newspaper’s history, and they joined a journalist workshop where they spoke about their entries.
Senior winner Siddhi, 17, explained how her poem, 'An Angel That Burns', was inspired by a Joan of Arc painting depicting Joan burnt at the stake, saying "I connected that with other wars and how other children have been affected by them. As for the language in my poem, I was inspired by Browning and Tennyson who I have learnt about in literature lessons, but I'm still trying to figure out my own style..."
She added: "My school made me realise this competition was a big deal and celebrated it after the news was revealed to me across Zoom."
Her father Sachin Deshmukh remarked that her accomplishments were "out of this world, not just for us but for the state we belong to and our country (India)."
Junior winner Shreeya, who toys with the idea of becoming a food critic one day, wrote her piece on The Little Prince after reading the book several times. She spent four laborious days on her ode to the character that has inspired her. She said: “And just like that it clicked. I found my hero.”
Shreeya said she was "pretty excited" to meet the Queen, saying "it’s kind of unbelievable."
Inspired by the everyday life of the people around her, 15-year-old Yong Sin Kong wrote her piece, ‘Observations made at a Local Kopitiam' on observing the people in her hometown.
She said: “It's mostly just a mixture of my experiences in my hometown and exploring my culture.”
She said it “still feels like a dream,” even after two months of finding out she had been selected as senior runner up of the competition.
She spoke of actress Michelle Yeoh, a fellow Malaysian who she admires and her favourite film, The French Dispatch by Wes Anderson, which she said has inspired the structure of her piece and encouraged her to consider a future career in journalism.The visit to the Standard was one of several this week for the group who also managed to tour Bloomsbury, the House of Commons where they watched a debate in the Houses of the Parliament, and the Royal Shakespeare company. Their time in London been described as "exciting" with various trips they hope will inspire their futures as potential writers of fiction and journalists.
Winning entries can be read here.
