A young offender who won an award for his poetry has been caught out as a plagiariser after a complaint by a prisoner also wrongly claiming the work as his own.

In an annual awards scheme for arts in jail, three poets gave the teenager a £25 prize for eight lines of verse that were written by a Tupac Amaru Shakur almost a decade ago. The youngster repeated the poem word for word in a collection called Thoughts from a Room.

But a young member of staff at the monthly paper found the lines familiar... His suspicions were confirmed when a search of the Internet revealed that this poem that had won a prize in the 2005 Koestler Awards, had in fact been written by Tupac Amaru Shakur, a gangtsa rapper shot dead in Las Vegas in 1996. The poem, The Power of a Smile, is on page 81 of a book called The Rose That Grew From Concrete.

The Power of a Smile
by Tupac Shakur

The power of a gun
can kill,
And the power of fire
can burn.
The power of wind
can chill,
And the power of the
mind can learn.
The power of anger
can rage inside,
Until it tears you apart,
But the Power of a Smile,
especially yours,
Can heal a frozen heart.