poet laureate:

For the past five years, Birmingham Libraries have run an annual competition to find the city’s Young Poet Laureate: an 11 – 18 year old who encourages young people across the city to enjoy and appreciate poetry through hosting events and workshops and writing commissioned poems. In the summer of this year, I apprehensively wrote the four poems required to enter the competition – but never expected the letter that came in early September telling me that I was one of the twelve shortlisted poets out of more than seventy entries!

As part of the selection process we were asked to perform two of our poems at the Library Theatre during the Birmingham Arts Fest. However, I was away on a French exchange on the day of the final, so couldn’t perform and was afraid that I would be dropped from the competition. Luckily, the organisers allowed me to do my performance on a different day to some of the Central Library’s staff, which was videoed and sent off to the competition’s judges. To select the winning poet, we were judged both on the quality of our poems and our performances, and over the next few days, I waited impatiently to find out who would be taking the role of Birmingham’s fifth Young Poet Laureate.

Soon afterwards, the competition organisers phoned me with fantastic news – I had won! I was astonished to say the least – I never thought that I would even be shortlisted, let alone chosen as the next laureate! I am very excited about what this year will bring, and I hope that I’ll be able to fulfil my role and encourage others to take an interest in reading, writing and performing poetry; I’m already planning events for this year, and I wrote and performed a poem for the Birmingham Half Marathon on Sunday. Thanks to the brilliant English department for their encouragement and enthusiasm!

India Miller 11V

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