THE Ledbury Reporter's Gary Bills-Geddes is celebrating this week, having won a poetry competition to celebrate National Poetry Day.

The open competition was organised by the Surrey-based publishing house, Dempsey and Windle, and Gary was one of three poets to be selected for equal top spot.

His winning poem, "At The Sea's Fringe Kingdom" will be published with the other winning poems and the shortlisted poems in a Dempsey and Windle anthology, to be launched at the Cranleigh Arts Centre near Guildford on National Poetry Day, October 3.

Gary has been invited to attend, to give a poetry reading and to accept his prize.

He said: "When I saw the list for the anthology, with work from many good poets, I was pleased to just be on that list; but when I looked more closely and saw I had actually won, I was flabbergasted. I don't enter many poetry competitions these days, and I give even fewer readings, because I've been side-tracked in my spare time with writing novels; so this has come as something of a pleasant surprise."

Gary's debut novel, "A Letter For Alice" was published by the New York-based publisher "The Little French" at the end of April. Before then, his focus was on poetry. His two full collections are "The Echo and the Breath" (Peterloo) and "The Ridiculous Nests of the Heart (Bluechrome).

Gary, who writes as Gary Bills, added: "Poetry seems to be coming back into my life. Only last week, I was asked to send some of my poems to Bucharest University, so that PHD students can translate them into Romanian."