'Flamingo' was awarded second place in the 2020 Cheltenham Poetry Festival..."There was nothing tame in the hundreds of entries in Cheltenham Poetry Festival’s Wild Poems competition. Judges Ben Ray and Anna Saunders worked extremely hard to develop a longlist of 14 excellent poems, each of their authors vying for the prestige and value of a prize." This is what Ben Ray had to say about the poem: "This poem is so warm, so immediately loveable and welcoming– it almost flows off the page when read. Imagery and colour is used intelligently and carefully here, employed at just the right moments across the piece – as a reader you can feel the pinkness and sensation of feathers seeping through the words! The narrative poem format can often be heavy, but is used with such expert lightness of touch here, with a strong fairy-tale element giving the structure a deeper resonance that questions initial interpretations. The storytelling is deliciously dark, with a ...