This is the third book of children’s poems that Coventry Lord Mayor’s Committee for Peace and Reconciliation has published. This year, working with Coventry Cathedral and Coventry and Warwickshire Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education (SACRE), we invited children aged 16 or younger who live or attend school in Coventry or Warwickshire to submit a poem on the themes of neighbourliness and/or peace.

Our judges, Craig Muir, Janey Manton, Ann Evans, John Greatrex and the Lord Mayor of Coventry Councillor Ann Lucas were presented with a great deal of work to read through all 341 poems submitted this year, the highest number so far.

All these poems are included a free ebook available from the Peace Poem website CovPeacePoem.uk

The judges each first selected their favourites, producing a shortlist of just over 100 poems, which they then ranked for their relevance to this year’s themes of neighbourliness and peace, the author’s originality and creativity, whether the poems carried a coherent message and the strength of the use of imagery and of language.

Those are the poems included in this book, which also includes the winning poems.

An ebook (PDF) of this book is also available from our online store.