Remember when we did this?

We caught up with the winner of the Commit at Kino competition from earlier this year – find out how his commitment is going!

At the start of the year we asked you to share with us what you would be committing to in 2015, and we were going to help one lucky winner achieve their commitment. There were so many worthy winners that it was really, really difficult to choose just one winner. In the end, we settled on one winner, two runners up AND we also put together a couple of workshops for all the aspiring writers and comic creators among you!

The winner of our 2015 Commit at Kino prize was Paul O’Malley. His commitment: to learn Korean so he could propose to his girlfriend! To help him with his commitment, we sent him to a Language Lab with Benny Lewis, author of Fluent in 3 Months and we gave him a bunch of vouchers to spend on learning Korean books. So Paul learned enough Korean to impress both girlfriend and her parents and when he popped the big question, she said YES! Congratulations, Paul!!

Our runners up were 6 year-old Jasmine de la Cerna, who wanted a puppy of her own, and Zoe Mik, who committed to reading more than 52 books this year. To little Jasmine we sent a puppy book pack (to prepare her for when she’s old enough to have her own puppy) and to Zoe we have been sending 5 books a month every month for the year.

For all the aspiring writers who committed, we organised a meet and greet session with Faber Academy and publishing house Allen and Unwin.

And the budding comic creators got treated to a workshop with our very own comic consultant, Chewie Chan.

We caught up with Hendrik Gericke, one of the comic creators recently and he is making steady headway with his commitment of completing at least one panel per day until his comic, REDOUBT is finished. Go Hendrik!! Here is some of what he has done already… to check out his work, visit his website or follow him on Instagram.

We’ll be doing Commit at Kino again in 2016, so start thinking about what you might want to commit to and we hope to see your commitments up on our wall in the New Year!