Dawn Gorman believes poetry should be everywhere - puts it on beermats, uses it to
work with people with memory loss, facilitates writing workshops, organises poetry
events and runs international poetry competitions. She is widely published, and has
performed in New York, Paris, London - and lots of smaller places in between.

“Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket;
you put your life into it and make something out of that.” Mary Oliver

Bradford on Avon Arts Festival Flights of Fancy Poetry Competition. Judge: Carrie Etter

Bradford on Avon Fringe Festival Open Poetry Competition 2013

Words & Ears/Bradford on Avon Fringe Festival Open Poetry Competition 2012

Bradford on Avon Fringe Festival Poetry Competition 2011

Ama Bolton reads Greyhaar, city of sea-mist

Zoe Siobhan Howarth-Lowe reads When NASA Finishes Mining

Natalie Whittaker reads Thoughts are Origami Birds

Iris Lewis reads A Hot Summer Day in Cougnac

Lesley Saunders reads Glass Man

David Van- Cauter reads Leakage

Darius Victor Snieckus reads Rising

Alex Kay, Deputy Mayor of Bradford on Avon, opens the finals event.

Paul Brokensha read Weird Sisters by Eric Berlin, and Climbing Girl by Penny Hope, in their absence.

Carrie Etter read a selection of her own 'Flights of Fancy' poems.

The line-up of winners.

Alex Kay presents Darius Victor Snieckus with his Local Winner's prize, her artistic interpretation of his poem.

Carrie Etter presents the second prize to David Van-Cauter

Bradford on Avon Arts Festival Flights of Fancy Poetry Competition. Judge: Carrie Etter

Judge's Report - Carrie Etter

Eric Berlin's Weird Sisters, with its fluency and precision, richly visualizes the scene of a poetry reading only to take us to a place of mystery and potential menace.

Ama Bolton's Greyhaar, City of Sea-Mist is reminiscent of Italo Calvino's masterpiece, Invisible Cities, as both illuminate how place can create culture.

Penny Hope's Climbing Girl lyrically, inventively imagines a girl and a bird in an unexpected struggle.

Zoe Siobhan Howarth-Lowe's original prose poem When NASA Finishes Mining borders on speculative fiction, imagining what would become of our world without a moon.

Iris-Anne Lewis's beautifully paced poem, A Hot Summer Day in Cougnac, blurs the line between sight and perception in spiritual experience.

Jill Munro's Ptarmigan imaginatively considers the power of names and naming. Indeed, we 'become' our names.

Kerry Priest's Debussy Writes Images tenderly evokes how musical composition creates another world.

Lesley Saunders' Glass Man powerfully explores what happens when a man seems to become what he feels in the aftermath of war.

Darius Victor Snieckus' Rising richly evokes the extraordinary in the animal life around us.

David Van-Cauter's Leakage, uses four sections to create a compelling montage in which the everyday collides with the threat of illness.

Deceptively brief, Natalie Whittaker's poem, Thoughts Are Origami Birds brings together real and figurative birds in a way that is both intriguing and provocative.