Winners announced for UK Poet Laureate’s The Laurel Prize
UK Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, and the Poetry School, are delighted to announce the winners for the annual nature and ecopoetry prize, The Laurel Prize. The prize is funded by Simon Armitage’s Laureate’s honorarium, which he receives annually from the King, and is run by the Poetry School. It is awarded to the best collection of environmental or nature poetry published each year. The winners were judged this year by the poets Mona Arshi (Chair), Caroline Bird, and Kwame Dawes:
The prize awards £5,000 (1st prize), £2,000 (2nd prize), and £1,000 (3rd prize). There’s also a £500 award for each of the Best First Collection UK and Best International First Collection. In addition, a winner will receive a commission from National Landscapes to create a poem based on their favourite UK landscape.
First Prize Winner
John Burnside (b. 1955 – d. 2024) was the author of fourteen collections of poetry and eleven works of fiction, as well as three uncompromising memoirs. He achieved wide critical acclaim in his lifetime, winning the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2000 for The Asylum Dance which was also shortlisted for the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes, and winning the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for Black Cat Bone. In 2015 he was a judge for the Man Booker Prize. Born in Scotland, he moved away in 1965, returning to in 1995. In the intervening period he worked as a factory hand, a labourer, a gardener and, for ten years, as a computer systems designer. He was a Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews and divided his time between Fife and Berlin.
Second Prize Winner
Hannah Copley is a British writer and academic who works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster. She is the author of two collections, Speculum (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), and Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry, 2024), which was a Poetry Book Society Summer 2024 Recommendation. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The London Magazine, Anthropocene, Blackbox Manifold, Poetry Birmingham, Stand, Under the Radar, Bath Magg, the Anne-thology and others. She runs poetry events at the Soho Poly in London and is an editor at Stand Magazine.
Third Prize Winner
Robyn Maree Pickens lives in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Tung is her first poetry collection. She has a PhD in English (reparative ecopoetics) from the University of Otago, and is in the early stages of growing a food forest.
Best First Collection UK
Charlotte Shevchenko Knight is a writer of both British and Ukrainian heritage. She was a winner of the New Poets Prize in 2022 with her debut pamphlet, Ways of Healing. Her debut collection, Food for the Dead, is published by Jonathan Cape. It won an Eric Gregory Award in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Forward Foundation’s 2024 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. Shevchenko Knight is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University and is based in York.
Best International First Collection
Megan Kitching lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her poetry has been published in Aotearoa New Zealand and international journals. At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023), her debut collection, won the 2024 Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The Time of the Wetlands was runner up in the Caselberg International Poetry Prize 2023. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident.
Mona Arshi 2024 Chair of Judges
Poet, Novelist and Essayist
“Once again the poets in the Laurel prize demonstrate how vital it is to include poetic vision in response to ecological disaster. What struck me most was the varied response to the climate emergency; elegy, lyric and careful observation are some of the tools employed and I was inspired by how the idea of nature itself was turned over and complicated. The books in our list contain some of the most alert and alive writing I’ve read in decades.”
Kwame Dawes 2024 Judge
Poet, Editor and Critic
“There is something affirming about reading poets who are deeply committed to mission of finding language to capture the lived experience of their lives — in so many ways, poets offer a powerful insight into the sentiment of our times, and so they offer as it were, a sensibility that reminds us not just of the facts of memory, but the blood and spirit of memory. The best poems are those in which the trauma that is unfolding on our physical world is neither incidental nor is it mere subject, but it is deeply embedded in their accounting of our times. In the end, we found great poetry that is urgent, surprising and truly alert to the earth in its complex and deeply alarming historical moment.”
Dawes on First Prize Winner John Burnside:
“A masterful poet in great control of his poetic skill, gives us tidy and sincere jewels that remind us of the ruin before us, even as they seek something of a blooming of possibility.”
