A WRITER from Teesdale has been crowned the winner of an prestigious competition out of thousands of hopefuls from across the globe.

Mary-Jane Holmes has been handed £5,000 after impressing British author and broadcaster Lemn Sissay who judged the poetry section of this year's Bridport Prize.

Commending the winning poem, Siren Call, which was selected from more than 4,250 entries, Sissay said: "It is like a short film. I am hypnotized by the Siren Call."

Ms Holmes is a writer, teacher, translator and editor based across Middleton-in-Teesdale and at other times on the Tex-Mex border of the USA.

She is currently chief editor of Fish Publishing Ireland and also editorial consultant at The Well Review, an international poetry journal based in Cork, Ireland.

Reacting to the award, Ms Holmes said: "I was thrilled to be told I had won the Bridport Prize for Poetry. It was a surreal moment: the wind was howling across the North Pennines that features a great deal in my work and the telephone connection was so poor, I wasn’t quite sure I had heard correctly.

"It still hasn’t sunk in to be honest. Having a poem picked out of a total of 4,258 entries is a wonderful boost of confidence and encouragement to continue writing.

"It gave me the self-assurance to submit my work to publishers and my debut collection comes out with Pindrop Press in spring 2018."

Her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Lonely Crowd, Prole, The Tishman Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and Best Small Fictions 2016.

Ms Holmes, who is completing a Masters in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford, is the recipient of the Martin Starkie Poetry Prize (2017), the Bedford International Poetry Prize (2017) and the Dromineer Fiction Prize (2014).

She has previously been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize both for poetry and flash fiction as well as the Doolin Prize for poetry, the Penfro Poetry Prize and the writer was recently commended in the Settle Poetry Competition.

The Bridport Prize based in Bridport, Dorset, is an internationally renowned open writing competition with categories in poetry, short stories, flash fiction and the Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award for a first novel, named in honour of the Prize’s founder.

Established in 1973 and with more than £18,000 in prize money to be won annually, the competition this year attracted almost 10,000 writers from 74 countries.

An anthology of this year’s winning entries, including Siren Call, is available from the Bridport Prize website at bridportprize.org.uk