Faber New Poets is a scheme funded by the Arts Council. Selecting four promising young poets a year, it aims to nurture their talent by providing mentorship, funding, and publishing a pamphlet of their work. Annie Katchinska is one of the winners this year. I came across her pamphlet (published 2010) in a bookshop last summer and enjoyed the poems, which are infused with all sorts of intriguing narratives and characters. Katchinska graduated from Cambridge with a Classics degree this year, and is now teaching English in Japan.

Of the scheme’s three elements, Katchinska has so far only taken full advantage of one – the publishing of a pamphlet. The good thing about the Faber scheme, she says, is that it’s really laid back. Which is lucky: though she wrote a lot before coming to Cambridge (enough to fill the pamphlet and win Foyle Young Poets Prize two years in a row), she found it hard to write while she was at university. “It’s not something that happens to everyone, but I found that when I was at Cambridge my mind was always on other things… I never really had time, and when I did have time I didn’t really want to.” She’s not too beat up about it though; the money and mentorship are waiting for her whenever she starts to really need them. She is in fairly regular contact by letter with her chosen mentor, the poet Selima Hill, who she describes as “amazing” (quite a few people agree with her), and when she ‘eventually’ returns to England she can make full use of the relationship.

But right now, she’s hoping that her time in Japan can clear her head and get her back to writing again. The outlook is promising, as she always found her “mind would wake up again” during the Cambridge vacations.” I can imagine some would find such a block worrying, but Annie Katchinska seems to have a quiet confidence in her own abilities – an entirely justified confidence. I ask her about one of my favourite poems in the Faber pamphlet, entitled ‘Too Many Storms’. It’s about a furious, failed Prospero figure. “I wrote that when I was revising for my A levels”, she tells me. “We were doing ‘The Tempest’… I used to write poems about revision instead of revising.” I used to play Gears of War on Xbox instead of revising, I think to myself quietly. Damn.

The pamphlet is all the more impressive for having been written when Katchinska was extremely young, some at the mere age of seventeen (she’s twenty-one now). There are drawbacks to this – the pamphlet certainly has its weak points as well as its strong ones. Would she change anything now? She measures her answer. “Yeah… but I’m not going to tell you what.” She laughs. “There are definitely lines in the older poems where I’m like ‘yeah, that could have been different’”. She doesn’t worry too much though – “You can’t really go back and change something that you wrote four years ago… that was me at that point, that’s what I wanted to write. They are finished poems, but just not how I’d write now.”

I sense that Katchinska writes for herself, rather than an audience. She makes me feel a bit silly when I ask her a half-hearted question about “the state of poetry today”, and whether poetry is becoming a minority interest. “I don’t think it’s becoming a minority interest, it kind of always has been.” Does this make her question what she’s doing? “If you start worrying about that kind of thing, it stops you actually writing.” For a moment she seems to falter a bit – “obviously you question what you’re doing if only a few people care about it, but I think you just have to try and ignore that feeling.” She soon finds her footing. “If you’re still doing it, and you still love it, then there’s obviously a reason.” Her certainty is convincing, and I find myself agreeing with her.

The Faber scheme doesn’t guarantee any future publishing deals, but it’s a possibility that Katchinska is keen to pursue – she makes it clear that she would jump at the chance to be published by any number of different presses. I hope to come across her name on the front of another book sometime in the future - if she does manage to recover from her time at Cambridge, that is.