A team of 12-year-olds from Durban has won an international literature competition.

Manor Gardens Primary School went up against school teams from the host country, New Zealand, and from the UK, the US, Canada and China in the annual Kids' Lit Quiz.

Isobel Sobey, the school's quiz co-ordinator, said: "We've entered the competition for the past five years and made it to the national finals four times."

This year, the team was really on top of its game: "The national finals took place in Cape Town and our team won hands down - the first time a Durban team has won in the competition's seven-year history.

"The event itself is always such fun; it feels like a game of soccer or hockey. In fact, Wayne calls it 'the sport of reading'."

"Wayne" is Wayne Mills, senior lecturer in education at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, who founded the literary competition for 11-to-13-year-old New Zealanders 20 years ago and in 2003 expanded it into an international event.

Each team answers 100 questions in 10 categories, on any literary genre - including comics, poetry, nursery rhymes and classics - and about publishers, authors' lives and first sentences.

South African teacher Marj Brown, who introduced the quiz to South Africa seven years ago, first heard of it while teaching in England.

She hurriedly assembled a team that lost the regional round by half a point.

It was an eye-opener, she said.

"Reading had never been put into the spotlight to this extent. Readers have always been the nerds lurking in the shadow of the library. They were never acknowledged. Suddenly, we were seeing [these] kids getting status and having fun.

"Someone once called the event 'a pub quiz without the booze'."

Brown initiated Kids' Lit Quiz South Africa with 20 schools in Johannesburg. Today, more than 150 schools countrywide participate and, in 2009, South Africa hosted the Kids' Lit Quiz world final at the Constitutional Court.

In South Africa, said Brown, children were at both ends of the spectrum, from illiterate to excelling in literacy.

"We need to have something to aspire to. In sport, we would never say, 'Do away with the Springboks until every one has access to a sports field'. We should showcase our good readers."

Manor Gardens Primary is setting an example.

"This year, for the first time, we held an inter-house literary quiz, hosted by our Kids' Lit Quiz team - it was an unqualified success," said Sobey.