Fairtrade Poetry Competition

This year, for Fairtrade Fortnight, we involved the local Fairtrade schools by running a poetry competition. Each school chose the best poem from their children to go forward to be finalists, and all the finalists were displayed in Hay Library (thanks, Jayne). Then Mel from the Poetry Bookshop judged the finalists.
The winner was six year old Patrick Morgan, from Clifford School, who got a book of poems and some book tokens, and yesterday morning he had his picture taken at the Library by the nice man from the B&R, with as many of the Fairtrade committee as could come. His mum and his sister and his gran were there to support him, too.
Mel chose the poem because it was happy, all about him eating his Fairtrade banana and thinking of the farmer buying rice and making his house nice, and Mel said that happiness was what Fairtrade and poetry should be all about.

The B&R photographer had rather cleverly also invited Fiona Howard along for a photo call - she arrived at the Library with a plaque under her arm, celebrating Hay's Gold Star status for the twinning with Timbuktu. I think they said that the plaque will be put up in the market square. There was a second plaque, too, but I don't know where that will end up (maybe it's going out to Mali?).