TORONTO - A 15-year-old student from Unionville, Ont., has won a Great War letter-writing contest from more than 3,000 entries from students across Canada.
Shobha Mehta wrote a letter from the perspective of a Japanese woman in British Columbia to her brother, a soldier serving in Europe.
Judges for the contest sponsored by the Dominion Institute included filmmaker Paul Gross and former governor general Adrienne Clarkson.
John Babcock, now 108 and the only surviving Canadian veteran of the First World War, was also part of the jury.
Shobha's prizes include a trip to Belgium to tour the battlefields of Passchendaele, where thousands of Canadian soldiers were killed or wounded in 1917.
In the letter, dated Aug. 23, 1917, Mehta writes of the woman's longing to hear about her brother's experiences and how difficult it is for her family without him.
