Teenage siblings make list of top 100 Young Poets of the Year

● Competition attracts more than 6,000 entrants from across globe

have spent numerous holidays.

He said all of his poems had a strong sense of geography and the land. “It’s part of the Scottish experience, we’ve got such a rich breadth of place,” he said.

“We’ve got a caravan in Loch Earn in the Highlands, sometimes we go on holiday to Crovie and I work in Peterhead in an industrial harbour. It’s all so different. That love of place suffuses everything I do.”

Both Magnus and his sister credited their parents, who studied English at university, with instilling a love of reading, writing and music in them both from a young age.

“Ever since we were tiny they would always read to us,” said Ailsa. “When we would go away in the summer, long days, mum would read out books to us in the evenings.

“Once I came downstairs and said ‘I wrote a story’ which was terrible – most of the words were misspelled – but she said ‘That’s great’.”

The 14-year-old, whose poem “Cello Child” is about her love of the instrument and music, said she was inspired by the same things as her brother but chose to write about them differently.

“We’re both very interested in Scotland as a place, but Magnus is very geographical, landscapes and the way things work. For me, it’s more about the culture.

“I love singing Scottish traditional ballads – I know that’s a bit weird for someone my age,” she added. “I also read far, far too much than can possibly be healthy.”

Writers from 89 different countries including Azerbaijan, Myanmar, Syria and Zimbabwe entered this year’s competition, which is open to 11 to 17-year-olds writing in English.

The poet Kayo Chingonyi, who was one of the judges, said memorable lines from the many poems he had read still popped into his head every so often.

“I was particularly struck by the number of poems that reflected on the complexities of living at this particular moment in time rather than taking their cue from poems and contexts of the past,” he added.

His fellow judge and poet Sinéad Morrissey said she had been impressed by the “maturity” of the young writers.

0 Magnus Dixon, 17, and sister Ailsa, 14, both appear on the Young Poets of the Year list