IT'S claimed that Mozart was five when he wrote his first compositions, while Picasso was drawing before he could walk. And while it would be unfair to compare Caroline Bird to such prodigious talents she, too, demonstrated early ability.

She won the Poetry Society's Simon Elvin Young Poet of the Year award twice in a row, in 1999 and 2000, followed by the £5,000 Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and this summer made the longlist for the Dylan Thomas Prize for her second poetry collection, Trouble Came to the Turnip.

Her first two collections were published by Carcanet when she was still a teenager and, at the grand old age of 21, she's just finished her third volume.

"I haven't got a title for it yet," she says, "but it's a bit neater and there are more rhyming poems to prove to myself that I could do them."

Caroline, who is studying English at Oxford University, was in primary school when she started writing poetry.

"I was seven or eight, although at the time I didn't realise I was writing poems, I just couldn't be bothered getting to the end of the line," she jokes. As well as poems, she wrote short stories and fairy tales and part of her prize for winning the Simon Elvin competition was the chance to join a writing workshop at the Arvon Foundation when she was 13.

"I was there with about 10 other 18 year-olds and being surrounded by people who felt the way I did had a profound effect on me and I remember leaving determined that I was going to be a poet."

Caroline grew up in Leeds and went to the Steiner School in York and despite moving to London with her family when she was 15, she says Yorkshire continues to influence her work.

"When I think of places in my head as backdrops, it's always a Yorkshire setting because all my childhood memories stem from there."

Her parents encouraged her to write, and she believes poetry should have a more prominent role in schools.

"We need to show that poetry is about more than just exams, that it's something you can do for your own enjoyment. A poem can be whatever you want, it doesn't have to be something that fits other people's rules or belong in books on dusty shelves," she says.

"I do a little bit of teaching in schools and at the age of 11 or 12 the children have some amazing ideas. But you find when they get a couple of years older, the world has got its claws into them and they see poetry as a bit silly or embarrassing, which is such a shame."

Caroline's first volume, Looking Though Letterboxes, was published six years ago. A member of the Royal Court Young Writers Programme, she's also written four plays, although you sense poetry is her real passion.

"A poem captures a moment, it's like taking a photograph and I love that feeling of being amazed. It's like being punched in the dark, a poem can hit you in a strange and wonderful way – it has that static electricity. You can look at poems in many different ways and find new meanings each time you read them."

Her poetry combines surreal wordplay with comedy and pathos and she is the latest in a recent line of gifted female poets who are challenging what was once a male dominion.

Caroline hopes one day to open her own creative writing school that encompasses not only poetry, but music, drama and dance, and reclaim the oral tradition of the spoken word.

She travels to India next month with the charity Second Sight to help to teach children who have recovered their sight how to write about seeing the world.

By then she will have found out if she has been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.