A ST ANNES grandmother is "write" on course for literary success after getting her poetry accepted for two anthologies.

Irene Holroyd, 52, of Carlton Road, said she is delighted that her poems -- entitled The Lonely Sea Monster, and Together Forever -- are to be published in compilations.

Irene said: "I always fancied writing but I had never known how to structure a story." So she joined a one-year creative writing course at The Blackpool and Fylde College in 1998 to develop her talent.

"My tutor told me I had great potential. I have always got something to write about. I can be inspired by a lot of things and I have got a quick eye, which was my job -- I used to be a quality controller."

Irene began submitting poetry and short stories to publishers about six months after she finished her course.

"I wrote to Anchor Books recently and I sent them about four poems and they chose one for an anthology. I was delighted."

Together Forever, a love poem, will be in a book called Two Peas in a Pod. Her poem The Lonely Sea Monster, which tells the story of a meeting with a creature based on the Loch Ness monster, will be in an anthology called The Young Ones. And Irene has also written a children's book -- as yet unpublished -- based on a character drawn by one of her two sons, Jason, 29, and Scott, 24, for her ten-year-old daughter Krystal's bedroom wall. "It's a little basketball with arms and legs," said Irene.

"My son created this little character and then I named it Slamdunk. I wrote a story poem which started off as a couple of verses and ended up as 30 verses, so I decided to turn it into a book with illustrations. It took me about three months to put together."

Irene said her family are "very pleased" for her. "They think I have done really well," she said. And Krystal, a pupil at Mayfield Primary school, St Leonard's Road East, St Annes, is also showing literary promise.

"My daughter has had 'A day in the life of a worm' included in a book which came out in February. It's an anthology of little poems and stories of the children of Lancashire. There were something like 38,000 entrants and there were about 22 entrants in her class who all won!"

And with three grandchildren -- and another on the way -- Irene wants to keep writing, especially for youngsters. "I would like to get my children's book published. I'm not going to give up -- I just enjoy writing so much," she said.