This is Young Poets Week, a new initiative helping KS2 and KS3 pupils explore, read, write and perform poetry. Spearheaded by the National Literacy Trust, the 24th to 28th November event helps celebrate young voices, champion creativity and place poetry at the heart of people’s lives.

The organisers predict up to 1,000 schools and 135,000 schoolchildren could take part, with a free classroom toolkit on offer to all UK schools to guide them through activities such as highlighting contemporary writers relevant to pupils’ lives; prompting them to use their own experiences, communities and identities as inspiration; and building their confidence in developing their own voice. There are also 120 in-person masterclasses across the country, matching up schools in disadvantaged areas with local poets to make the genre come alive in the classroom.

Young Poets Week also sees the launch of a search for 12 Young Poet Laureates, run by the National Literacy Trust in partnership with the National Poetry Centre.

The level of interest in poetry among 11 to 17-year-olds is certainly thriving if the Foyle Young Poets Award is anything to go by. Judges Will Harris and Colette Bryce received more than 28,000 entries from 10,000-plus people in 135 countries for this year’s contest. Run by The Poetry Society, it’s a great vehicle for spotting and nurturing emerging talent – so editors may well find themselves hearing from the 15 winners and 85 commended over the coming years…

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On the subject of education, I’ve been thinking fondly about Moniack Mhor, the creative-writing centre in the Highlands. Hearing that a friend, Niall Campbell, was tutoring a poetry course there last week with Jen Hadfield made me nostalgic for this beautiful place that had a truly transformative effect on me.

I’ve only been there once, over two decades ago, when I was in my early 20s. At the time, I was in a well-paid job in a "respectable" profession. But one morning while on that residential course in Inverness-shire, I walked to the nearest post office and sent a letter of resignation. Friends and family thought I had gone a little mad (perhaps I had), and I’m not advocating career-desertion as a wise route for would-be writers, but those five days were so inspiring, so motivating and so different from anything I’d experienced that I simply couldn’t not roll the dice. I came back knowing I’d found not just my vocation, but also my people.

The level of interest in poetry among 11 to 17-year-olds is certainly thriving if the Foyle Young Poets Award is anything to go by

During the years since then (the venue was run in partnership with the Arvon Foundation at the time), I’ve had an enduring belief in the power of lifelong learning.

Sadly, it’s a lesson I learnt late as my school tended to turn out car thieves rather than classicists, but we’re lucky in the poetry sector lucky to have a thriving network of online and in-person educational opportunities.

Just one of the organisations doing great work is the Poetry School and I’m currently attending a series of its workshops tutored by Wayne Holloway-Smith. A winner of the National Poetry Competition in 2018 and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 2020, there’s much excitement in poetry circles about Wayne’s new book, RABBITBOX, which comes out next spring with Scribner Editions. It’s described as a "transfixing, heart-rending, formally inventive piece, which follows a mother and her young son living under the shadow of an all-consuming domestic threat". It was acquired by Scribner Editions’ senior commissioning editor Joanna Lee from Imogen Morrell and Claudia Young at Greene & Heaton.

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Congratulations to Karen Solie and Vidyan Ravinthiran who took the Forward Prize Best Collection gong – the first time in its history it has been jointly awarded.

Following the announcement, all eyes have now turned to the 2025 TS Eliot Prize, the winner of which will be named on 19th January. It could even represent a "double" for Karen Solie, who’s also on the shortlist for this award. Wellwater (Picador) is described as a "self-interrogative conversation with a culture in crisis and a natural world on the brink".

Given I’m not on the judging panel, I figure I can be frank about my favourites – so I’m keeping my fingers firmly crossed for by Gillian Allnutt’s Lode (Bloodaxe Books) or Sarah Howe’s Foretokens (Chatto & Windus).

Solie and Howe, meanwhile, are among those highlighted by the ever-readable and incisive Maria Crawford in the FT, highlighting her top picks of the year. Her list also includes A History of England in 25 Poems by Catherine Clarke (Allen Lane) and The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside (Jonathan Cape).

I’m yet to read the former, which apparently sweeps from "the 7th-century Venerable Bede to a Georgian’s vision of a dystopian future, to a post-Brexit cricket green", but I can heartily recommend The Empire of Forgetting.

I was never lucky enough to meet John, who died last year, but we were in touch via email and he was always tremendously encouraging about my work. I wasn’t surprised, therefore, to see one of his colleagues, the Iranian-American writer Dina Nayeri, describe him in a tribute as a "most generous and caring mentor" and refer to his "bottomless stores of kindness and warmth".