Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith, first year English and French student at LMH, is an avid poet whose talents led to her winning the National New Poet’s Prize in 2020. She has performed poetry at various events and festivals, including Off the Shelf Festival of Words, Sheaf Poetry Festival, Ledbury Poetry Festival, and in February she will perform at the Kendal Poetry Festival 2021 which is taking place online.
Her work has been published in several anthologies, including She Will Soar (Pan Macmillan 2020). In 2019, she was highly commended in the Young Northern Writers awards, and won the Foyle Young Poet of the year competition later that year. You can read the award winning poem here - I want to stand naked in the school hall.
In 2020, she was accepted into The Writing Squad – a development agency for writers based in the north of England, and won the National New Poet’s Prize with her short collection ‘Ugly Bird’, which will be published by The Poetry Business in June.
Lauren said this about her passion for poetry - "I love putting different words and ideas together and seeing what images you can create, what emotions you can evoke – words are endlessly versatile and you can create anything from them. I also find that writing is an excellent method of catharsis. I like writing about human relationships and the natural world, but also wider issues such like mental health, sexism and classism."
