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Your basketChrissie Gittins UK
Chrissie Gittins was born in Bury in Lancashire. After studying at Newcastle University she took a Fine Art degree at St Martin's in London, and worked as an artist and a teacher before becoming a full-time freelance writer.
She has published two pamphlet collections of poetry with Dagger Press — A Path of Rice and Pilot. She has won prizes in the Lancaster Literature Festival Poetry Competition, Poetry News competitions, the Yorkshire Open and the Ottakar's Faber Poetry Competition. Her poems, short stories and poems for children have appeared in a wide range of magazines, newspapers and anthologies; several have been broadcast on BBC Radio Four and on the BBC World Service. Her children's poems won two prizes in the 2002 Belmont Poetry Prize and her children's collection Now You See Me, Now You... was shortlisted for the CLPE Poetry Award 2003. She also writes plays for BBC Radio Four.
She has held residencies at Springhill Hospice Rochdale, Bangkok Patana School Thailand and Belmarsh Prison Thamesmead and in 2001 she was awarded an international fellowship at Hawthornden Castle.
(2003)