A COUNTY Durham poet has been presented with a Queen’s Gold Medal for her work.

Gillian Allnut, who lives in Esh Winning, was given the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2016 at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace today (Tuesday).

Dame Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, also attended the ceremony.

Ms Allnut said: “When Carol Ann Duffy e-mailed in November asking for my phone number – to talk, as she said, about ‘a poetry thing’ – I was truly surprised and delighted when the ‘thing’ turned out to be nothing less than The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

“I am sad, though, that my mother is no longer here. She was always a staunch supporter of my choice to be a poet and she would have been so proud.”

Born in London, she spent half her childhood in Newcastle and returned to the North-East in 1988.

After studying philosophy and English at Cambridge University, she spent 17 years living in London and writing a number of collections.

She was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize for her collections Nantucket and Angel and Lintel, poems from which feature in her Bloodaxe retrospective How the Bicycle Shone, which draws on work

Since 1983 she has taught creative writing in a variety of contexts, including at Durham University in 2013 and 2014.

She won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award in 2005 and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2010.

Dame Carol Ann, said: “From her first collection published in the early 1980s, Gillian Allnutt’s work has always been in conversation with the natural world and the spiritual life.

“The North is a constant touchstone in her work; canny and uncanny, its hills and coast, its ancient histories and its people.

“She has the power to comfort and to astonish in equal measure. In her outlook, her imagination, her concerns and her lyric voice she is unique.”

The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry is awarded to someone in the Commonwealth with recommendations made by a committee of scholars, chaired by the Poet Laureate.