Battle of the Book – Secondary Semi-finals

In May 2023 our school had the honour to host and participate in the Battle of the Books semi-finals.

Battle of the Books is a school-on-school battle, challenging student’s memory and passion for reading through 20 books, including multiple books of different genres. Introduced in Hong Kong in 1999, this team-building event has helped forge friendships not only between grades in a school but between schools as well. On a personal point, this competition has helped our team make important friends. 

This year the team was made up of TKO students (Margaux Peloux, Victoire Lafon, Mia McKenzie, Svetlana Bouev), BPR French stream students (Alice Yao and Arthur Simoneau) as well as international stream students (Ipshita Somani, Aashi Mohapatra, Avelin Chan, Ethan Wu, Joshua Lam, and Sriyansh Srikanta). Those who unfortunately didn’t make the team still attended the battle as active supporters, cheering their friends on. Certain schools brought significantly smaller teams than ours, purely made up of the cream of the crop, but we brought the maximum 12 possible to diversify the team and give everyone a chance to participate. Thanks to our team we managed to score 82 points, finishing third in the semi-finals, only beaten by CDNIS (runner-up) and ISF (winner). Although the title of honorary winners has to go to Island School who distributed substantial amounts of food to other teams during the break time, outside the auditorium.

Even if team FIS didn’t bring the champion title back home, this club still managed to achieve its goal – to create a group of like-minded lovers of reading, and they competed amazingly. They managed to perform splendidly under limited time and helped support each other throughout the competition. A big round of applause to the team, supporters, Mr Wilson, Mr Harper, Ms Rebuffet-Liu and the librarians.

Thank you again to the student team leaders Teagan Hamilton, Jizelle Weisshuhn, Maya Rodenbeck, Sarah Hussain, Louise Arbey, Emilie Foster, Flora Fouillet, and MoFei Pham for their amazing hard work, creativity, and leadership.

MoFei Pham and Louise Arbey