Sarah Lucas, 17, from Burgess Hill is a winner in one of the most prestigious poetry competitions in the UK.
Sarah, who is an Upper Sixth student at Burgess Hill School for Girls, was chosen as one of the 15 winners in the Foyle’s Young Poets of the Year Award 2010 out of a total of 20,500 entries from across the UK and globally.
The competition was judged by the well-known poets Luke Kennard and Jayne Draycott.
Sarah was invited to a prize giving event on National Poetry Day (Thursday 6th October) at the Royal Festival Hall in London where she read her poem ‘Dr Livingston writes to Stanley’ to the 250 guests and famous poets. One of the guests at the event was Carol Ann Duffy, one of the best selling poets in the UK and the first woman to hold the prestigious job of UK Poet Laureate which she was awarded in 2009.
Sarah’s prize is a week-long residential poetry writing course at one of the prestigious Arvon Centres alongside the poets Luke Kennard and Jayne Draycott. Her poem will also be printed in a winners’ anthology and she will have a year’s Youth Membership to the Poetry Society’s new YM magazine along with the stack of books given to her at the prize giving event.
This is not the first time Sarah has won a major poetry competition. In June last year she was one of sixteen winners with her poem ‘Dieppe 2009’ in the national Poetry Live! Poetry Competition. It was judged by the poets Gillian Clarke and Imtiaz Dharkar and she won a writing course at the T? Newydd National Writers’ Centre in north Wales.