Tonight the Premier League launched the new Primary Stars poetry book ‘Beautifully Different, Wonderfully the Same’ in Pall Mall.

The book is full of children’s poems on the subject of diversity and some celebrity poems too, inspired by Joseph Coelho’s poem, whose title was used for this book’s title. One of the winners of the poetry prize was there too, travelling down from Birmingham to read her poem to a packed room of adults drinking champagne. Maariya signed my copy of the book and when I asked her what she and her dad were doing that night in London she said she was driving back to Birmingham because she had school the next day.

Whether they had written a poem before or not, children are always fearless and candid when they try writing and this anthology is no different.

Maariya Khan’s poem ‘an Ordinary Girl from Birmingham’.