OWEN Lowery may have been paralysed from the neck down, but the freedom of his imagination means that his tutors at the University of Bolton are hailing him as one of the best poets they have ever taught.

Not bad for a man whose life started out in a much more physical vein.

Owen was a national judo champion when he was just 17-years-old. But a freak accident while competing left him unable to move any part of his body below his neck.

The accident happened when Owen was aged just 18 and he spent the next two years in hospital.

“It’s a massive thing — you never really adjust,” he says.

Confined to a wheelchair, requiring round-the-clock-assistance and unable to even breathe without help from a machine, Owen became something of a modern-day polymath. Now, aged 39, Owen, who was born in Reading, has moved to Billinge.

Through the Open University and Chester College, he studied modern art, literature and military studies, before turning his brain to creative writing.

Having signed up to do an MA at the University of Bolton, under the tutelage of published poet Jon Glover, Owen became one of the first pupils on the university’s new creative writing PhD.

“I think that interest in writing poems has always been there,” he says.

“I think the stories you can condense into them are fabulous and the process fascinates me.

“It’s such a neat form of expression. You can express in a poem what you might otherwise write in a novel or an essay — it’s an amazing form of language.”

Owen writes using a specially-modified computer. He controls a mouse on screen using a headset, but says that his best poems rarely come when he is ready for them.

“Of course ideas always come when the computer’s not on, so people are always having to write bits of things down for me.”

Owen is uncertain as to the extent that his disability has affected his poetry.

“I can’t compare it to the poetry I would have written,” he says.

“I would have written poetry anyway — whether it would have been the same is impossible to say. It probably affects the poetry to an extent, but it’s not often the subject of it — I don’t tend to write specifically about my disability, maybe because I don’t want people to prefix the poems.

“I don’t want to be thought of as a disabled poet — I’m a poet who just happens to be disabled, and I want to be on equal terms.”

Owen has had a ghost story recorded by the BBC and poems published in Envoi and Carillon magazines.

He was also long-listed for the 2007 Virginia Warbey Prize.

Now he is focusing on his PhD, which includes elements of a previous Masters degree in Military Studies.

He says: “Warfare and struggle do come up. You could say that they were related to personal struggle in my interpretation of them, perhaps. It gives me a sort of empathy, I suppose.

“But there’s a lot of personal background in there as well — I think that’s something a lot of poets do — so a lot of stuff from childhood comes up.”