24 August 2026
I think writing is one of the strangest things we do as people.
A thought begins in one person’s head – completely private, impossible for anyone else to see – yet somehow, through twenty-six letters, it ends up living inside somebody else’s. That’s always fascinated me. Writing is the closest thing we have to borrowing consciousness. A memory that only belonged to me suddenly belongs to someone I’ve never met. Something painfully specific becomes strangely universal.
There are moments in your life that divide it quietly into a before and an after.
Noticing the unfamiliar
For me, one of them was walking into Ms Lockwood’s English Literature classroom.
I arrived carrying a year’s worth of questions I couldn’t quite name. New streets, new accents, new classrooms – everything felt slightly unfamiliar, as though I’d stepped into a world that everyone else already knew how to navigate. I think that’s what moving does. It turns you into a witness. Suddenly, you’re paying attention to things everyone else walks past. The way rain gathers on brick instead of palms. The rhythm of conversations on buses. The silence people leave between sentences. When nothing feels familiar, everything becomes worth noticing.
I still remember sitting in class reading Heroes by Robert Cormier, talking about illusion and reality, asking whether Francis was ever really a hero or whether we’d simply been taught to believe he was. I’d never studied literature like that before. We weren’t looking for the “right” answer – we were pulling stories apart, finding contradictions, questioning narrators, arguing over symbols. It felt less like reading and more like archaeology; every paragraph asked us to brush away another layer until something hidden finally caught the light.
I left those lessons seeing stories everywhere.
I know that probably sounds dramatic, but that’s exactly how those first few months felt: dramatic. Every feeling seemed magnified. Every unfamiliar street, every new accent, every passing conversation felt like it was trying to tell me something. I had been dropped into a world where nothing came with the comfort of familiarity, so I began observing instead. I watched people the way you watch the opening scene of a film, convinced that every detail might matter later. Somewhere along the way, my Notes app became a scrapbook of fragments – a sentence overheard on a bus, the colour of the sky after rain, a stranger laughing to themselves. None of it meant anything on its own, but I couldn’t bear the thought of letting those moments disappear before I’d understood them. My journal slowly became a home for the days that overwhelmed me – the beautiful ones, the lonely ones, the confusing ones. Looking back, I wasn’t really writing poems, but instead was teaching myself how to pay attention.
And I think that’s all writing really is.
Not having the biggest vocabulary, or the cleverest metaphor, but learning to notice what everyone else walks past. A writer’s job is to pause where other people keep walking – to look twice, to ask one more question, to wonder why something ordinary suddenly feels extraordinary. Once I realised that, writing stopped feeling like an “escape” from the world. It became my way of entering it more fully.
Every Sentence Earning Its Place
When the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition was announced, that way of seeing suddenly had somewhere to go.
What drew me to the competition wasn’t simply the idea of writing 2,000 words. It was the thought that thousands of young people, scattered across completely different corners of the Commonwealth, would all be responding to the same prompt through entirely different lives. Someone in Fiji would notice different things to someone in Ghana, or Canada, or Pakistan, or Wales. We were all being asked the same question, but our answers would be shaped by what we had learnt to pay attention to.
That felt quietly beautiful to me.
When I began writing about Bayard Rustin, I never wanted him to become a history lesson.
History books often flatten remarkable people into dates and achievements. I wanted to imagine something quieter. What happens after someone changes the world? Where do their dreams go? Do they disappear, or do they hide themselves inside ordinary moments?
That became the heartbeat of Nights Like These (Take a Seat).
One of my favourite moments in the piece comes almost accidentally.
“oh look, Rustin –”
It’s almost laughably casual.
There is no grand introduction. No dramatic unveiling. Just the sort of sentence somebody might mutter whilst walking through a city. I love that. I love giving enormous ideas ordinary entrances. A few lines later we’re talking about dignity, civil rights, and collective memory, yet the doorway into all of that is simply, “oh look.” I think history deserves to be spoken about like that sometimes – not placed behind glass, but allowed to walk beside us.
My writing nearly always begins the same way. Usually with an image I can’t seem to shake. A streetlamp trembling in the wind. Purple light reflecting across wet pavements. A boy selling bracelets beside a fountain. Those images arrive first, and I spend days collecting them like loose pieces of sea glass. Only afterwards do I begin asking what they might mean. The writing isn’t really the difficult part. The noticing is.
Which is why the first draft is never the piece.
Editing is where I discover what I was trying to say all along. I’ll move paragraphs around endlessly, delete pages I’d convinced myself were brilliant, and replace a sentence I love if it sounds cleverer than it feels true. I read everything aloud because writing has to sound right before it reads right. If I stumble over a line, I know someone else will too. I’ve learnt that readers rarely remember the most beautiful sentence in a piece. They remember the sentence that made them stop.
Bayard Rustin fascinated me because he was never really the loudest voice in the room. He wasn’t remembered for a single speech or a single photograph. He was remembered for what he made possible. There was something profoundly moving about that. We often celebrate the people standing at the front of history, but rarely the ones quietly holding it together behind the scenes.
I realised I didn’t want to write about Rustin. I wanted to write around him.
Instead of placing him at the centre of the poem, I wanted his presence to linger in the margins, almost like a companion walking beside the speaker. That’s why the essay doesn’t begin with protests or politics. It begins with a city at night. Streetlamps. Pavements. Silence. I wanted readers to discover Rustin in the same way I imagined hope often appears – not all at once, but gradually, quietly, almost by accident. By the time he arrives, he already feels as though he’s been there all along.
That was probably the hardest part to write. Every sentence had to earn its place. I kept asking myself the same question: Is this here because it sounds beautiful, or because it needs to be here? More often than not, the prettier sentence lost. I wanted the language to disappear behind the feeling, so that readers weren’t just admiring the words but were living inside them.
Writing for People, About People
Months later, I was asleep when the email arrived.
It was just after midnight.
I remember opening it half-awake, reading the words Gold Finalist, then immediately reading them again because I was convinced, I’d misunderstood. Within minutes, every light in our house was on. My family probably had no idea why I’d burst into their rooms in the middle of the night, but they celebrated before I’d even managed to process it myself.
I reached out to the Royal Commonwealth Society Wales simply to say thank you. Instead, they welcomed me into a community that has given me opportunities I never imagined when I first opened my Notes app to write down scattered thoughts. Today, I’m incredibly proud to work alongside them as a Youth Ambassador and to speak at events about writing, storytelling, and the power of young people’s voices.
It’s funny, though. As I write this now, I don’t actually think Nights Like These (Take a Seat) is the best thing I’ve ever written. I can already see how much my writing has changed. The way I build images, the risks I take, even the way I think about language – it all feels different now. But I don’t see that as something to be embarrassed about. I think every piece carries a version of the person who wrote it. That essay reminds me of who I was at fifteen, and I’m grateful to it for getting me here.
More than anything, I’m grateful for the people who continue to shape the way I write.
My family have always believed in me long before I believed in myself. But my friends deserve just as much credit. They fill my life with conversations, inside jokes, disagreements, impossible questions and the kind of ordinary moments that quietly become poems without any of us realising. Almost everything I write begins with people, and I feel incredibly lucky that mine are as thoughtful, kind and endlessly inspiring as they are.
Tomorrow, I’ll probably overhear another sentence on a bus.
Or notice the way the light catches a window.
Or one of my friends will say something completely ridiculous that somehow ends up in a poem.
And, knowing me, I’ll write it down.