Congratulations to Rachel McGladdery, who won a hard-fought, top-quality poetry slam on Monday night in Wigan - and it was her first appearance in a slam too.

She pipped, BBC Radio 4 slam finalist, Michael Wilson in the final round of this new type of slam.

The two previous rounds had seen extremely tight contests in a series of face-offs. A number of strong poets were eliminated, even though there was a paper-thin margin dividing most of the paired poets.

However, in the end, it was Rachel's intimate, heart-felt poems (in each round) that won that over the judges and led to her being declared the NXNW poetry-slam-champion of 2010.