Senasuru's Curse - By Dakshika Cooray

Written By: Dakshika Cooray

Category: Short Story

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

Dakshika Cooray presents "Senasuru's Curse," a captivating short story featured in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar. The narrative unravels in a world of myth and misfortune, weaving a tale that balances the ancient with the contemporary. As readers delve into the story, they encounter themes of loss, resilience, and the mysterious dance between human and divine realms. This competition brings forth a diverse array of voices, offering a platform for writers like Dakshika to share their unique narratives with a global audience.

About the Work

"Senasuru's Curse" is a rich tapestry of mythology and human emotion. The story explores themes of fate, love, and redemption through evocative imagery and a lyrical narrative style. Dakshika Cooray crafts a world where curses and blessings blur, and the protagonist's journey is marked by profound encounters and transformative realizations. The story's mood shifts seamlessly from mystical to poignant, leaving readers contemplating the intertwining of destiny and choice.

Senasuru's Curse

Original Submission by Dakshika Cooray

SENASURU’S CURSE

PART ONE

The girl’s grandmother tried everything.

Since that monsoon night they pulled the water-bloated bodies of the girl’s parents from the reservoir, until the day she died, aththamma woke before the cockerel, grated coconut and squeezed hot milk over a boiling pot of rice. She cut the steaming kiribath into neat dove white triangles and place them on a banana leaf at the foot of the araliya tree, an offering to the babbling rookery in its branches.

Every full moon poya day, she visited her childhood friend, the shaman, who lived under an overhanging rock atop the only mountain in the village, and returned to the girl by blanched midnight, the folds of her wraparound cheeththa fat with charmed bodhi strings, incense-bleached gecko exoskeletons and copper sura medallions stamped with indecipherable squiggles, meant to be the faces of gods.

Yet, one morning, the girl woke to find a pair of rubber slippers arranged neatly by a basin of soaped crockery and her grandmother, feet up in the well.

After the bucktoothed boy who gifted her a fistful of purple dahlias was trampled by a rampaging elephant and the young mother who made the girl five new cheeththa frocks was found swinging merrily from the nuga tree on New Year’s Eve, the girl decided never to love another human being as long as she lived.

But she didn’t have land to till and harvest and her aththamma’s grain stocks dwindled fast.

One particularly misty morning, she let her silhouette dissolve into the frigid white blanket in a stupor and woke to find herself in the shaman’s cave.

‘A bleak day for foraging.’ They fed her spoonfuls of a colourless gruel and helped her unsteadily to her feet.

When the girl didn’t respond, the shaman sighed. ‘You can’t live without others forever.’

The girl looked away.

‘You wouldn’t have to let them in,’ The shaman waved their spindly fingers, mimicking chena cutting. ‘Just hover on the edges and catch what falls off the table.’

So the girl went down to the village and found work in the fields.

She spoke sharply when spoken to and rearranged the lines on her face in a permanent scowl. The effort was unnecessary, for rumour moved fast in small lowland villages and before she knew it, five years of hearing how cursed, how terrible, how unfortunate she was, had rushed past.

In all that time, she was only responsible for two floods, one minor drought and collapsing the solitary bridge over the river on Buddha’s birthday – forcing half the village to travel to the next town to visit the other half.

With every new misfortune, the number of scars on her scraggly body grew, untreated where she couldn’t reach. Her ears burned with the unkind names the villagers conjured up for her. But a thankless life was far less heavy a yoke, than guilt.

And she would have sunk comfortably into her thorny existence, had it not been for Tissa, the mudalaali’s son.

________________

PART TWO

Tissa, privileged third child of the only general store for three villages. Tissa, with his dimpled smiles and open-collared batik shirts. Tissa, who smelled like secret flowers blooming in the night air. Tissa, who all the girls in the village liked looking at. Who liked looking only at her.

The villagers warned him against dallying with the Reaper’s Bride, but Tissa paid them no heed.

When she was struggling uphill with two metal pails of water for the cattle, denting one and earning a new sleeve of bruises down her leg with the other, he took them from her hands and didn’t spill a single drop.

She dared not open her mouth for she feared that the moment she did, he would fall dead at her feet.

Tissa poured the water into the shallow troughs, mixed in the leftover rice polish, restocked the grass and hosed down the one calf caked in dung.

He caught her looking.

Whatever expression she had on her face made him smile, his dimples caving into his lustrous skin. He laid a warm hand on the top of her head.

‘Can I see you again tomorrow?’

It was the question he had asked her every day over that blessed month, whenever he appeared like a welcome breeze in a hot July, picking up after her, carrying for her, trying to coax a smile from her lips.

Every time, she had ducked out from under his hand and escaped the glowing circle of his crushed flowers scent. Happy only to know he was around.

But she allowed her head to dip in the most insignificant of nods and hoped he didn’t notice.

Tissa smiled wide.

The last she saw of him, was the left side of his face, still dimpled and smiling as he waved goodbye from the hillock.

That same side of his face, the villagers later said, the only bit of him that they found, unscathed.

What he was doing in the black forest in the middle of the night, or what the lions were doing there, outside of their place in myths and fairy tales, no one ever knew.

They blamed her. Of course they did.

Tissa would have inherited his father’s shop, forty-three acres of farmland, three chena fields and a grey marble bungalow overlooking an irrigation tank built by an ancient king. The villagers said his mother went mad and his father, the mudalaali, who the girl had feared would outright kill her on sight, had diminished into a husk of a man. Tissa’s sisters were married off to the quickest of bidders.

‘There she goes,’ the villagers clustered together at the edge of the paddy fields like a flock of gibbering geese, rattan baskets of new rice plants strapped to their sides like satchels. ‘People fall dead around her, and she doesn’t even bat an eye.’

She tried to ignore them; she really did. It should have been easy, she had twenty years of practice.

She clenched her fists around the belt of her basket. The hot burn around the edge of her heart turned white, like Tissa’s smile.

She rushed at the wheelbarrows, upending the compost into the paddy fields, and splashed into the turbid water, crushing the young plants underfoot, kneading them into the mud and out of sight.

For the first time in her memory, she took a breath in blessed silence, without the incessant drone of gossip buzzing in her ears. Not even a cricket dared chirp against her.

Then she spun on sodden bare heels, ignoring the cries of the angry villagers and hurtled straight into the forest.

________________

PART THREE

It was nearing nightfall when she finally stopped running.

Her arms and legs were slashed and raw. Her hair was a nest of twigs and leaves. Tears blurred the rippling silver sky, empty but for Saturn and his insubstantial rings hanging low like an ill-fitted blouse.

The girl drew a bloodied hand across her eyes and glared at the accursed planet.

She began to shake, her cries culminating into wails as she stamped her feet and struck her breast, sinking to her knees in agony.

‘Why is this happening to me?’

‘Caw,’ came the only answer in the eerie quiet of night.

The girl raised her head, trying to adjust to the dark.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Caw,’ declared a sleek black crow, hopping from one foot to the other on the rotting branch of the dead tree, gnarled overhead like a disapproving elder.

It reminded her of the birds her grandmother kept fed on milk rice in the hopes that they, as Senasuru’s supposed messengers, would deliver aththamma’s prayers to the gods.

The girl cast about for a pebble which she lobbed weakly at the bird. “Get away,” she spat.

The crow skipped to a higher branch and cawed again. It sounded uncannily like a human laugh.

The girl tottered to her feet.

The crow cocked its head to a side and stared right back, beak open and beady eye twinkling. It was laughing at her.

She had finally gone mad. She was probably going to die in this forest just like Tissa, so she slammed her fists on her knees and cursed the crow.

‘A curse upon thy inky feathers, Senasuru, god of misfortune. May whatever scourge befalls me, befall thee tenfold. May my pain be thy pain, may my anger and sorrow corrugate to iron on thy lips. And when one day thou findst something to truly love, may it be wrenched from thy grasp. So neither the stars in the sky and mud from the depths of the ocean could ever return it to thee.’

She collapsed, her chin wilting into her bosom, clutching fistfuls of fallen leaves to the edge of her skirt, as if she could leech life into dead things with just the power of her pain. She didn’t notice the crow cough, spitting out a couple of wet feathers.

It squawked, coughing again and nearly lost its grip on the high branch.

The third time, the note of terror made the girl look up.

The crow was smoking.

As she watched, her mouth agape, its sleek feathers turned blue with flames, frizzling like the mercury pop of a daguerreotype she’d once seen capture real life images and distil them into paper at the mudalaali’s wedding anniversary. The day Tissa had smuggled her a selection of festival sweets, wrapped in oil paper.

The girl stared with morbid fascination as the bird burned brighter and grew larger before her very eyes until she had to shield her face with a scarred forearm.

The light flashed and disappeared, flushed into a vacuum. On the bare branch where the crow once perched, sat a fully naked boy, knobbly brown knees drawn together, and tousled inky hair fluttering in the wind.

He looked down at himself in horror and when he spoke, his voice was high and boyish like the condescending cackle of a crow.

‘Where are my fucking feathers?’

The branch cracked under his weight, and he plunged to earth with a squawk.

________________

PART FOUR

In her defence, crows did not turn into boys every day, so you will excuse her for screaming and tearing out of the forest like the whole of hell was after her.

She didn’t stop running even as the forest spat her out on her knees, into the rice fields she had earlier trashed, now mercifully empty. She didn’t stop running until she crashed onto the rattan porch of her one room shack and found that the boy had followed.

He collapsed beside her, wheezing, his hair decked in the detritus from the forest.

‘What,’ he managed between gasps, ‘are we running from?’

The girl stared at him until her brain caught up. At her next scream she fell right off the porch.

He peered over the edge, thick black eyebrows scrunched.

‘What are you doing? Are humans always this loud?’

She covered her eyes with her hands. ‘Aren’t you ashamed, running around like that? Where are your clothes?’

‘I don’t know.’ He seemed to mull it over carefully. ‘I usually haven’t the need for them. The feathers… the feathers were sufficient cover. At least no one ran from me screaming when I was a crow.’

She had seen him change. But hearing this made her realise what she had seen. ‘When you were a what?’

‘A god needn’t cover themselves the way you humans do, although I have seen your shrines, how you shroud our likeness in stone and tree wood with elaborate sarongs and saris and jewels. That is nothing like what we look up there.’ He pointed a long dark finger at the sky.

‘What – who are you?’

The naked boy stood to offer her a flourishing bow. ‘Senasuru. Trickster god of fortune.’

She burst out laughing. She heard the tinkling of hysteria in her tone and leaned into it, accepting that she had indeed, lost her mind. ‘The god of misfortune? What are the odds?’

He scowled. ‘How dare you. I am not the god of misfortune; I am the god of fortune. It’s you, fragile mayflies, who turn your luck sour.’

‘I was born under your unaligned constellation.’ Her lip curled maliciously as she stared him down. ‘That is the only wrong that’s condemned me to this life.’

He fluttered his hands. ‘A divine being doesn’t argue with mortals. How did you trap me in this flesh prison?’ He tugged at the flabby skin below his belly button. ‘Turn me back this instant.’

‘I don’t know how.’

‘Clearly you do. Is this how humans seek revenge? An eye for an eye? That’s what you creatures ask for in your prayers, no? You’ve had your fun, so change me back and return my powers to me.’

‘You don’t have your powers?’

He sagged in an exaggerated show of exasperation, a very human expression.

‘If I did, I’d conjure up some clothes for myself just to stop you staring.’ He gestured between his thighs.

The girl blinked.

Ducking her head to hide her blush, she rose and went into her shack to root around in the straw bag that she had saved her family’s clothes. It was wrapped in one of her grandmother’s faded cheeththas and on particularly sad days, the girl used it as a pillow.

Finding nothing of her father’s, she resorted to picking the least floral of her grandmother’s cheeththa skirts.

She threw one at his feet.

‘What’s this for?’

‘If anyone else sees you like that, they’ll cut if off with a blunt axe.’

He wrapped skinny arms around himself and peered anxiously at the shadows that clung to the edge of the wood.

‘Around your waist,’ she ordered when he seemed to struggle. ‘And come with me.’

‘Where are we going?’

It was late afternoon when the two of them made it to the top of Hunugala, the only mountain in the village with its abrupt pockmarked limestone cliff.

They stepped out of the brush into a small clearing on the edge of the world with the tattered remains of a tent stretched across an overhanging rock and a mango tree laden with red fruit and bluebottles. The wizened shaman sat in front of a fire, coughing and swatting at the billowing grey smoke.

Though they looked fragile at first sight, the girl knew of the shaman being strong as a buffalo with a tongue that wagged like the tail of a dog.

As soon as they saw the girl and the god, they burst into delighted peals of laughter.

‘Oh, I believe you.’ They cackled. ‘No human man could carry off a floral print with such grace.’

The girl could see that the god was offended. But he offered no retort, turning his back to them as she continued with her story.

When she was done, the shaman called him forward and held his wrist to look for a pulse.

‘There’s no way around it, little god.’ They sighed and patted him on the arm kindly. ‘You must strive to live it out until you know empathy. She has lost everything. You have paid with your divinity.’

The girl waited for an outburst, but the god was silent, apart from a wayward comment on the scratchy quality of the sarong and vest the shaman gifted him. When he was dressed, he quietly followed her home.

But as the days of the week tumbled past, she came across him many times, running about the yard like a madman, throwing himself against obstacles, deliberately stubbing his toes or smacking face first into trees.

‘What in the devil are you doing?’

‘I am in pain.’ He wailed, sprawling on the sand, dramatic and hopeful. ‘Oh, to be fragile and human.’

He waited.

Nothing happened.

So when she came home from the fields to him writhing on the sandy ground, she ignored him for the most part until he threw himself down on the sack mattress and told her he thought he was going to die because there was a storm in his stomach.

It took her a while to recall that he hadn’t eaten anything since the day he became human. She had been too preoccupied, and she had never had a housemate, divine or otherwise.

She heated up some gruel and fried a handful of salted sprats as a guilty afterthought, burning three fingers in the process.

She popped her fingers into the salt jar on reflex, for these kinds of minor misfortunes were commonplace.

She caught him frowning at her blistered digits throughout dinner.

When it looked like he would remain a boy for the unforeseen future, she took him to the fields. The manioc harvest was almost upon the village and an extra set of hands meant an extra bit of food.

She introduced him as her father’s recently deceased sister’s son, ignoring the cruel glint in their eyes.

‘Tissa hasn’t yet cooled in his grave.’

‘I wonder which way this poor boy will go.’

‘Do you want to wager on that?’

‘Are you insane? And bring her apalé down on ourselves?’

The girl found it easier to dodge their malice now that she could see the cause of it, toiling away in the sun beside her or going crossed-eyed as he stared at the purple manioc skin like he had never seen anything like it before.

He kept her up that night, groaning and rolling about with a terrible stomach-ache and only confessed to eating raw manioc after she threatened to throw him out in the rain.

It took her a long time, more so than the villagers, to notice that he was unluckier than she.

If she spilled the water jars, he dropped them and cut his ankles open in the shards. If the lines of paddy she planted, browned and died, his birthed an epidemic of worms that decimated the fields of an entire neighbourhood overnight.

The girl felt a blanket of something heavy and desolate lift from her shoulders. Her days were no longer filled with despair and self-loathing, for she was no longer the topic of gossip.

He was.

After the incident of an overnight vigil protecting the corn harvest, ended in him riding atop an angry bull elephant as it ravaged the fields and destroyed every lookout post in the vicinity, the villagers picked through the debris in the morning, complaining that the god of misfortune himself could do no better.

It made her burst out laughing, and if they didn’t think her mad before, they surely did then. Though they were angry at his bad luck, they didn’t vehemently hate him as they had done her.

That implication sobered her, as they walked home. She still called him to treat his injuries and saw that his back now matched hers, with myriads of scabs scattered across his thin dark shoulder blades.

He sat meekly as she applied ointments and crushed herbs on his wounds.

Assuming all her bad luck had transferred to him, she tried, one blistering morning, to pick the mangoes looming over the stile by the ford, a feat she would never have dared before.

She was rudely corrected when the brick holding her weight, disintegrated underfoot, dowsing her in a thin red film and instead of the mangoes, the skin around her elbow peeled open.

She berated herself for letting her guard down, hissing as she returned home to pull bits of dangling dead flesh, but found her hand gently pried away.

The god, the boy, she didn’t know what he was anymore, escorted her to the porch and sat her down, vibrating with concern as he pulled out the ointments, blowing on her wound and clucking as if she were a child.

‘I know how much it hurts.’ He told her, his black eyes serious.

You smell like mangoes, she thought.

________________

PART FIVE

When the headaches first appeared, she didn’t even notice them.

But as the days blurred into one another and the heaviness persisted to squat permanently upon her brow, she became aware that her movements were laboured and slow.

The villagers thought this was her acting out in light of her recent good fortune and took every opportunity to make their opinion known.

‘I should have cursed them instead.’ The boy stamped the limestone with a scrawny palm, sprawled next to her on the cliff, watching the sun bleed out.

‘Well, why didn’t you?’

He looked bashful. ‘You said I wasn’t to fuss. But how dare they treat you like that?’

‘And how do they treat me?’

‘Like you are undeserving.’ His voice dipped. ‘You deserve the world.’

A softness settled about her collarbones every time she looked at him, sweating in the sun, wiping rainwater from his brow, smiling unguardedly at a butterfly or recoiling in horror from her home-brewed herbal teas.

Or when he was being like this, on her side.

She awoke the next day, in the velvet fog of dawn, to find that her body was too heavy to move.

She managed to croak instructions to him and got some lukewarm gruel and a cold wrap for her forehead, hoping that a little more sleep would help.

It didn’t.

He hovered by her bed, day and night, waiting and waiting for her to get better and when she didn’t, for himself to get worse.

But when he remained hale and hearty and she retreated before his eyes, her skin shrivelling, her thick black hair losing its lustre, her big brown eyes growing dimmer and dimmer. When she could no longer tell him what to do, the boy remembered the shaman and went to fetch them.

The shaman sat with the girl for a day.

The boy could read human expressions quite well now, and what he saw on the old medicine giver’s lined face chilled him to the bone.

The shaman said nothing but patted his arm as kindly as they had done the first time, maybe a bit too kindly, and asked him if he was capable of finding work and medicine on his own.

The next morning, with leaden feet and many backward glances, the boy went to get work.

All day he ploughed and plucked and slashed and burned and stood in line, quivering with impatience until he was handed his day’s due.

Then he ran home as fast as he could, bringing new herbs and meat porridge from the general store – no longer run by Tissa’s family – hoping to find the girl awake.

He fed her spoonfuls with his own hands. He held up her head as the shaman dribbled herbal concoctions past her chapped lips.

But every day, she got worse.

He came home at dusk, laden with fruit of every kind that he begged, stole and coerced from the villagers. When he told them it was for her, they sighed and looked at each other with an expression that made him want to tear the skin from their faces.

This wasn’t how it used to be. He heard them think.

He tugged the door slowly open.

Inside, sat the shaman, flickering in the light of the oil lamp like a shadow demon.

The girl lay on her mat, shimmering under a sweaty film.

He could hear her heart’s weak stutter from where he stood so he threw himself to the ground and gathered her into his arms. He felt her sigh, almost contently and bury her nose in his vest.

‘Why is this happening?’ Tears blossomed for the first time, cascading down his face like a fall of wilted sepaalika petals. ‘How do I make her get better?’

‘The stars from the sky,’ said the shaman, their voice soft. ‘And mud from the deepest part of the ocean.’

A sob escaped the boy’s lips. ‘I can’t do it. I am not a god.’

‘But you are.’

His grip tightened on her shoulders, when he realised that she had spoken. Her voice was the barest fluff of feather down. But he heard it all the same, and from the furrow between their brows, so had the shaman.

His tears mingled with her sweat, and he watched the droplets kiss on the apple of her pallid cheek. He reached for her hand, entwining her cold fingers in his, bringing it up to place a kiss on her palm.

‘Tell me what to do. I’ll do anything.’ He lowered his head to rest on her chest, hiccoughing when he smelled the rot on her breath.

‘Bring me mud from the deepest part of the ocean. Bring me stars from the sky.’

________________

PART SIX

The command was hers, he knew he had to do it, whether or not he believed he could in this fragile form.

He left home that day without looking back at the faint light emanating from the thatch.

For three days and three nights, he trekked through the black forest, hiding in ditches and trees when large animals preyed on him, his vest and threadbare sarong catching on thorns, slipping down cliffsides, paring skin on stone like meat on a hot blade.

When he got to the shoreline and stood before the unfurling cornflower blue, with human wonder, he saw that from down here, the ocean looked far more ethereal than it had ever been in his omnipotence.

Prayers were spewing from his lips.

The shock of it made him cough.

‘Please God, please let me find the mud and bring it back to her. Let me scale the skies and catch the right stars.’

Who did he mean? He had been a god. Or was he addressing the complete pantheon from whence he came? The gods of grain and growth, of fertility and war, love and drunkenness. Who was he praying to? And would they answer? They must. He was once, one of them. He would’ve answered desperate prayers, wouldn’t he?

‘You must listen.’ He prayed, his voice growing stronger. ‘You must allow me to achieve these feats, for I am human, but we all know, that in times of dire need and desperation, how capable a mere human is. How they come face to face with gods.’

He sniffled, wiping his eyes and walked into the sea.

The waves lapped against his skinny legs, gentle at first, like the calves in the paddock after they learned to overcome their fear of his scent. But then, the threat of lifting him off his feet grew stronger and stronger, until he was floating and then swimming.

He tried not to think too hard; he simply moved his hands and feet as his instincts demanded. When the time came, he dove beneath the surface, letting the feeling in his heart guide him as he swept through the water, forcing his stubbornly buoyant body to peel through layers of depth, heading to the bottom of the ocean.

His prayers had changed to a single mantra, the soundtrack to his dive.

I can save her. I can bring her back.

He ignored the pressure in his ears, pushing back with a thousand hands at his brain. He ignored the strain in his arms and thighs, the keening screams of muscle being forced to do what human beings were not supposed to.

The water pushed at his eyes, his nose, his mouth, trying to find a way to rush inside and capture him, make him one with the ocean, but he did not relent.

I can save her. I can bring her back.

The deepest part of the ocean swam into view.

The boy kicked fervently, bounding off the surface of the ocean floor in a cloud of turbid water. His fist curled around slippery, slimy mud, glowing in shades of amber and gold.

He began a long swim back to the surface, in his mind’s eye, he was a small frog, paddling violently against gigantic riptides.

By the time the ocean regurgitated him onto the wet sand, he seemed to have forgotten how to breathe.

He rolled onto his back, clutching his fistful close to his heart.

Had the gods answered?

Was this what it was to have faith? To ask and to ask and never know if anyone heard?

He rolled again, onto his knees.

The tins lay discarded on the beach. He had not expected to return.

He had “borrowed” two that the rice plants came in before he left home, on the bizarre chance he was able to do something remotely godly in his pathetic humanity.

He lowered the dripping mud into a tin, gently pushed the lid shut and looked up in time to see the maw of the horizon close its shimmering teeth over the sun.

He wiped a mud-streaked hand across his face, pushing his hair out of the way.

There was a dull thud where his heart would be.

He started running along the beach, following the dark as it deepened.

The stars took a while to materialise in the blackness, but when he saw them, the path was clear.

His feet thudded solidly, in an almost musical pata-pata until they were no longer on the ground.

He kept his eyes on the stars.

They were growing brighter.

When the first star was close enough, he grasped with trembling fingers, ignoring the acidic burn on his skin.

He could feel the stardust boiling red, bloody blisters in between his fingers, but he didn’t look down, dropping each star carefully into the tin, until it was filled to the brim.

How many stars was he supposed to take back?

He was closing his fingers around the last star when a sharp pain appeared so suddenly and so violently in his chest that he had to look down to make sure it wasn’t exposed and bleeding. He gasped, clutching his heart, feeling something like bile and blood wet his throat. His chest felt like it was going to break open.

The boy said, “Oh,” and turned back into a crow.

The End

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, hosted by Hashtag Kalakar, celebrates the art of storytelling and poetry. This prestigious event invites writers from around the world to share their literary creations, fostering a vibrant community of creativity and expression. As a celebration of diverse voices and narratives, the competition provides a platform for both emerging and established writers to showcase their talents to an international audience.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Dakshika Cooray for sharing "Senasuru's Curse" with us in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. This enthralling short story adds a layer of depth and imagination to the competition, and we are honored to feature such a compelling narrative. Thank you, Dakshika, for your contribution and for inviting us into the world of Senasuru and the transformative power of storytelling.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.