Shropshire record breaker rubs shoulders with Hollywood star Nicole Kidman

Amy Hughes, who broke a world record last year by running 53 marathons in 53 days, was invited to attend the Woman of the Year awards lunch this year in recognition of her achievements and the work she has continued to do to raise money for charity and encourage young people to get fit.

She spent Monday afternoon mingling with other amazing women, including GB Paralympian Georgie Bullen, World War Two veterans Joy Lofthouse, who flew a range of different aircraft including a Spitfire to strategic battle points, and Eileen Younghusband, who alerted allied forces to the first V2 bombing of London, whilst serving in the Women's Auxiliary Air force, as well as singer/songwriter Katie Melua and presenter and actress Baroness Floella Benjamin.

She said: "Today wasn't just special because I got to meet some pretty cool celebrities. It was special because I met some amazing women that have done extraordinary things. I'm so, so proud to be a British female right now."

One of the biggest celebrities in attendance was Hollywood A-lister Nicole Kidman, and Amy managed to not only meet the star but capture a selfie with her.

She then tweeted:

Kidman was at the ceremony to present a lifetime achievement award to Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astronomer and physicist who discovered pulsar stars in the 1960s. While her supervisor, Antony Hewish, and another researcher, Martin Ryle, went on to collect the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 for the discovery, Dame Jocelyn missed out on the award, despite having been the first to observe the celestial bodies, and the fact that she was named as the second of the winning paper's five authors.

Jane Luca, chairwoman of Women of the Year, said: "Dame Jocelyn truly deserves the Prudential Women of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award to celebrate her lifetime accomplishments and her remarkable contributions to science."

Five other women were also recognised at the annual awards ceremony, including Jayne Senior, who helped uncover the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal, and Kristin Hallenga, who campaigned to raise awareness of breast cancer self-examinations.

The overall Women of the Year award went to Cokie van der Velde, a grandmother who is working in Africa with victims of Ebola.