Sasha, the Duchess of Abercorn, comes in out of the damp of a Co Tyrone morning, a cheerful spaniel waddling hard on her heels. She is tall, blonde, fair-skinned and not at all like her poet-ancestor, Alexander Sergheivich Pushkin, who was short of stature, and had soft dark eyes and a head of black curls - a throwback to his Ethiopian slave origins.

This morning is about the only one this week when she's at home. Home is Baronscourt Castle where she lives with her husband James Hamilton, fifth Duke of Abercorn and Lord Lieutenant of Co Tyrone, but she's barely touched down there since things started warming up for the annual Pushkin Prizes competition: every year, between January and Easter, she gets out on the road to visit some 50 participating schools on both sides of the Border.

This year, there was a temporary hiccup when a local Sinn Fein councillor objected to her proposed visit to St Mary's Primary School in Pomeroy, Co Tyrone, mistakenly thinking she was a member of the British royal family. Martin McGuinness, Minister of Education for Northern Ireland, personally phoned the head teacher, Michael Harvey, three times in an attempt to resolve the problem.

"Martin McGuinness has been an absolute gentleman over all this," the principal says. He had explained earlier that he had postponed the visit so as not to distress Her Grace and that if Queen Elizabeth herself wanted to promote poetry in the school then she should be treated courteously. He is hoping to reschedule the visit of the Duchess.

The story ran and ran but with precious little reference to what the visit was all about. Now Her Grace has had enough of it: smilingly but firmly, she guides the conversation away from Pomeroy and back to her beloved Pushkin project. Twelve years ago, she set up the Pushkin Prizes Trust following a Pushkin get-together at her grandmother's home in Luton Hoo: "There was every sort of person there, from white Russian to Soviet officials from the Russian Embassy, and it made me realise the power of poetry and how it can bring people together who might otherwise live on different sides of a divide."

It was her grandmother, Zia Wernher - a great grand-daughter of Pushkin - who first stimulated her interest in the poet: "She was always talking about him, though at first, as a child, I used to just think: what a funny name. But after a while, I came to realise he was a living force and that Russian people loved the vital energy of his poetry. Everywhere you go in Russia you see flowers laid at the foot of his statue. He is revered in a way no other writer is. Only last year, for the bi-centenary of his birth, the centres of both Moscow and Petersburg were closed for the celebrations. No cars were allowed in and all the lampposts were hung with his picture."

Unexpectedly, it was the Pushkin factor which formed the last part of a jigsaw which fate decreed the Duchess should complete. She first came to Ireland, on her marriage in 1966 and found her preconceptions of it more or less correct: "I'd thought of it as a land of fairy tales and of mystique and my first impression of it was that it was a land of magic. It was full of warm summer sunshine and the gorse was out." There is a pause before she continues: "And then the Troubles started."

It took 10 years before she really began to feel at home in Ireland. In that time, she learned - partly from the experience of bringing up three small children, the youngest of whom is now at Trinity - of the effect shooting, killing and mistrust could have on children. "I could see the stress and emotional disturbance it all caused." By then, she was looking for some way of getting involved in her adopted country.

She had previously trained as a Jungian transpersonal counsellor and was working both sides of the Border. Hard to imagine a duchess actually having a job but she shakes her head: "It wasn't a job, more a journey." She had turned to Jung when she found herself at a T-junction in her life. She won't elaborate but it was a time when decisions had to be made and the Jungian philosophy was a driving force: "For me, Jung opened up a new symbolic world, a world of the imagination."

She'd been educated at a high-Anglican school in Berkshire where she had learned, from bitter experience, that educating the logical, rational side of the brain was not enough: "We have to be whole, and this is where the creative process comes in. It works particularly well with children because they are still in touch with the dream world. If we can express ourselves in writing, we can unlock our imagination and change our reality. Whatever is latent can come to the surface, and the darkness within, too, has got to be expressed, though you have to find a balance of course."

She's on a roll now, but I have to interrupt to find out more about the logistics of it all. I can see the connection between the creative expression and empowerment through Pushkin, but where do the schools come in?

"Well, I put the idea of a creative writing competition to Michael Murphy of the Northern Ireland Western and Education Library Board, and together with Harry Cheever, Schools Inspector in Donegal, we worked on the project." Teachers were approached first and offered seminars and workshops on creative writing. Then, with further support from the Ireland Funds, the ball started rolling.

Now, some 15,000 children have written poems, stories, haiku and telling accounts of their short lives, ranging from recollected fear of a near-death experience to the heady excitement of school swimming day. Schools keep in touch by email and fax. Seamus Heaney is a patron and this year the main judge will be William Trevor. There are residential weekends for teachers and summer camps for children and their parents, and the trust regularly publishes a selection of the children's writings.

In Baronscourt Castle, it must be hard to avoid Pushkin. What does the Duke think of him, I ask? "Well, the first time he went to Russia, he wasn't taken with it but the second time was different. It was the White Nights and we went down the river on a boat and to the Kirov and now he's come round. Though he wouldn't be keen to sit through four hours of Boris Godunov."

There have been other, unexpected spin-offs. When the trust was thinking of having a fundraising event, someone came across two Russian gypsy violinists and a guitarist doing their stuff in a wine bar on London's Cromwell Road. The Duchess brought them over to Belfast to play for her event where their virtuoso playing was quickly snapped up by Belfast's Rotterdam Bar. From there, it was a short journey down to Whelan's in Dublin's Camden Street where the band, Loyko, have become a major and much-loved attraction. Anyone who saw the film Eugene Onegin - based on the narrative poem by Pushkin - will have recognised their playing on the sound track. The two violinists - and their families - are now Irish citizens. Pushkin can work in mysterious ways, not all of them poetic.

Schools wishing to participate in next year's Pushkin Prizes should register in September. Contact address: The Pushkin Prizes, Baronscourt, Newtownstewart, Omagh, Co Tyrone. BT78 4EZ. Email: pushkinprizes@rmplc.co.uk