I'm a winner!

Yes it's true. As the super sleuth team of Peter Goulding and Michael Farry have already found, I have won the Plough Poetry Prize in the short category. I am absolutely delighted.

See my poem, Amsterdam Otto Recommends and others here. Congrats to Peter for being longlisted also in the short poem category and storming through the children's poems too.

Unfortunately I have a clash on dates and won't be able to make it to Devon to pick up the cheque in person.

What I found most interesting was the judge's comments. Dalgit Nagra (of whom I am an instant fan) read a lot of levels into the poem. Fascinating.

Some background on the poem. My beloved and I got engaged while we were living in the Netherlands so we went to Amsterdam to get a ring. Our diamond seller of choice was the campest diamond seller in the whole world, Norwegian Otto of the title. The wealth of diamonds scattered was, I suppose, like the proposed wealth on offer during the years of the Celtic Tiger.