Congratulations to the winners of the National Write-a-Poem Competition:

Mo Barry Wilson in the 7 - 8 year old  category with the poem  Boy on a Bicycle

Josephine Jay in the 9 - 11 year old category with the poem Past to Present

To link with the IDENTITY theme of National Poetry Day 2006, the Children’s Poetry Bookshelf asked children to write a poem on the theme of ‘Me’.

A distinguished panel of judges, chaired by poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan, then selected  from nearly 5,000 entries the best three poems from each age group. The entries reflect the diverse society we live in. Ian McMillan commented:

These works prove that a poem is better than a photograph, better than a passport, better than a form you have to fill in to tell everybody how old you are and how tall you and what colour your eyes are. These poems tell us about ‘me’; whoever ‘me’ is.

Prize-winning poems will be published in a booklet and featured on www.childrenspoetrybookshelf.co.uk

The Children’s Poetry Bookshelf National Write-A-Poem Competition is run by the Poetry Book Society, with the support of the T S Eliot Foundation. 2006 was its inaugural year. The competition will now become an annual event – details of next year’s contest will be available on the Children’s Poetry Bookshelf website from September 2007.