The second-year English student at Clare College is a published poet who has won the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award two years in a row. She has performed her work at the Ledbury and Wenlock poetry festivals.

What makes you sit down and write a poem?

My impulse to write usually comes from a thought that’s been knocking around in my head for a while and then from the desire to get it down in a way that feels true to the original feeling. At the same time I am also trying to turn it into something new, complete and aesthetically pleasing.

When did you write your first poem?

Like most people, my first poems were written at school and featured rhyming couplets and farm animals. But the first time I felt really invested in a poem was aged 11 when we were asked to write about the Holocaust. I was a bit traumatised by what we’d learned and felt a responsibility to take it seriously, so I wrote a poem about the piles of victims’ shoes outside the camps. It’s not a topic I’d be brave enough to tackle these days.

Who are the main influences on your poetry?

My inspiration comes from so many weird and wonderful places that I feel like a bit of a magpie. I want a bit of Sara Peters’ surrealism, Frances Leviston’s economy of language, Sam Riviere’s lurid treatment of popular culture, and John Berryman’s ability to flip between humour and pathos in the space of a single line. Reading poetry helps with the technical side because I find myself unconsciously picking up rhythms and patterns of thought from much more talented people.

What makes someone a poet? Is it a different way of seeing the world, a different way of using language?

In my experience it’s the ability to turn up 20 minutes late to anything! But I’d also say that it’s being able to look at things from unexpected angles. The reason clichés are ineffective is that you’ve seen them too often to be really thinking about what they mean; the best poetry surprises you, through form, syntax or imagery, into seeing things from a new perspective. To do that you need to understand how flexible language is and to be able to turn it to your own purposes.

You won the Foyle Young Poets Award in 2011 and 2012. How has winning the award helped you?

If I hadn’t won, I don’t think it would ever have occurred to me that I could seriously ‘do poetry’. It’s an award which, with 15 overall winners and 85 runners-up a year, is much more focused on nurturing creativity than competitiveness, which is unusual and so vital in any creative discipline.

How do you feel about performing your poetry? Would you rather be read or heard as a poet?

I enjoy performing, but would describe myself as a page poet because performance poetry is a very different genre: a sort of shared cousin of page poetry and rap. The visual element is important to me, but a good performance can give shape to a piece just as much as being able to see the line breaks. And I like the snippets of context that sometimes come with a reading. Often to get to grips with a poem properly you have to experience it both ways.

Have you found that being in Cambridge has helped or hindered your creativity?

Perhaps surprisingly, I’ve found Cambridge incredibly beneficial for my writing. I think being surrounded by literature, ideas and people who are crazy about their subjects means I’ve had to find a way to filter all that information. There’s also a lot more work to procrastinate over! I sometimes go to the Pembroke Poetry Society and the Baudelaire Society, and I’ve been in Notes, but Cambridge actually has a real deficiency in centralised creative writing opportunities.

Can you see yourself as a poet post-university, earning a living from writing?

Absolutely! But that would have to be a perfect world in which there was also eternal peace and a system that provided me with chocolate cake in my room by magic. In reality, though, even the most successful poets generally have day jobs. I have no idea what the future holds but I’m pretty certain it will include a lot of poetry.