Best-selling poet Wendy Cope makes a welcome return to Winchester for a major performance of her work at Winchester's Theatre Royal. She spoke to the Daily Echo's poet-in-residence Polly Clark about her work and her enjoyment of performance.

WENDY Cope's books, including Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis and If I Don't Know, have sold over 200,000 copies, a figure that would delight most novelists, but is almost unheard of in the world of poetry.

She is one of the few contemporary poets to reach audiences who would not normally consider themselves poetry readers, and she is also taken seriously by the literary world.

In 1999 she topped a Radio 4 listeners' poll for who should be the next Poet Laureate.

But Wendy's life and success as a poet has come unexpectedly. She said: "When I was a child I had the idea that I might be a writer of some sort, but that I turned out to be a poet is a complete surprise."

For many years Wendy lived a non-literary life as a teacher in London, and it was these years that gave her the material for the wry, funny and moving poems of her first books.

Her most recent book, If I Don't Know, marks a shift in style and in her life and contains poems that look back at the past from a safer, more contented place. It also contains more ambitious poems including a story in verse.

This latter achievement has made her wonder about other forms of writing. "I have gone off writing poetry for now," she admits. "Perhaps I've put myself off by writing a long poem. I thought, if I can tell a story in a poem, what's stopping me doing it in prose?"

But even if another book of Cope poems may not be forthcoming for some time, Wendy's pleasure in meeting her readers is undimmed. At the Theatre Royal she will be taking questions after the reading.

She said: "The readers do get something from having the poems read and talked about, but they get something else from being able to ask me questions."

A performance is also a chance to try out new work. Wendy has been giving readings since 1980, so she has earned a quiet confidence in what might work.

She likes to see if the poem she thinks is funny gets a laugh. "But I also try quieter poems. Afterwards people might come up and say 'I really liked that one,' and that's a wonderful feeling."

What advice would she give someone hoping to be a poet?

"Read a lot." she says. "Poetry of the past and present. It's okay not to like it all - you can be bored by 70 per cent of it, but you need to like some of it!

"And when you're writing, try for an hour. If you're not getting anywhere, stop after an hour and do something else.

"When it's going badly some people give up after ten minutes. The most important thing is not to be too focused on getting published. Your aim is to get better at writing."

See Wendy at the Theatre Royal, Winchester on October 21 at 7.30pm. Box office: 01962 844600.