UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and the Poetry School are delighted to announce the winner of 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. This year’s winner Katrina Porteous was judged by the poets Kathleen Jamie (Chair), Daljit Nagra, and former leader and co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, Caroline Lucas:
Winner:
Katrina Porteous – Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books)
Finalists in alphabetical order:
Judith Beveridge – Tintinnabulum (Giramondo Publishing)
JR Carpenter – Measures of Weather (Shearsman Books)
Eliza O’Toole – A Cranic of Ordinaries (Shearsman Books)
Carol Watts – Mimic Pond (Shearsman Books)
The prize awards £5,000 to the winner and £1,000 to each of the four finalists. This year’s Laurel Prize Ceremony was on Friday 19 September 2025 and was a part of BBC Contains Strong Language Festival. You can watch a recording of the ceremony here.
Judith Beveridge, 2025 Laurel Prize Finalist
“I am delighted and honoured to be a finalist for this prize, especially as it is an international prize which recognises the significance of nature writing in a world where so much of our flora and fauna are under dire threat from climate change and other man-made disasters. In my poetry, I have always tried to impart a sense of reverence for the natural world, to pay deep attention to it, to show interrelationships through sound, metaphor and simile, to open up spaces for celebration and contemplation, to use language as a mechanism for wonder, joy and revelation.”
JR Carpenter, 2025 Laurel Prize Finalist
“Weather has long been the subject of small talk and indeed there are many minute observations in Measures of Weather. In light of the climate emergency we’re now living in we also need to ask big and different questions of weather and its measure, and the language we use to render this subject. I am immeasurably grateful to the Laurel Prize judges and organisers for helping to bring the pressing questions in this book to the attention of a much wider audience.”
Eliza O’Toole, 2025 Laurel Prize Finalist
“On the day my book was launched at the Small Publishers Fair in London, a browser looked at its cover and said, ‘oh no I don’t want to read about the countryside, it’s all fields and farming’. And I thought – how can we ever hope to protect something that isn’t cherished. Becoming a finalist means to me that the ‘countryside’, with all its fields and farming, with all of its ‘manifold particularities of the natural world,’ has a chance to be recognised, not only as the ‘other’ side of the country, but as a unified whole in its own right.”
Katrina Porteous, 2025 Laurel Prize Finalist
“It’s humbling to be a Laurel Prize finalist. For me, poetry is a kind of listening, and transmitting what I hear. I live on the coast, which constantly reminds me that human life is both vanishingly insignificant and astonishingly powerful. I want my poems to express that range of scale, to pass on what I’ve learnt from scientists and from my home communities – that small, local attachments can influence enormous planetary mechanisms, and that this brings hope. A multitude of voices, human and natural, imbue the poems in Rhizodont. Being a Laurel Prize finalist means most to me because of them.”
Carol Watts, 2025 Laurel Prize Finalist
“I’m delighted and honoured to be shortlisted for the distinguished Laurel Prize. Mimic Pond is a collection that walked itself together quietly over several years, so it was a welcome surprise! It matters to be recognised and gathered together like this. We are in a time when poetries responding to the environmental crisis and planetary nature are urgently in play, sharing multiple forms of witness but also finding the language and new imaginaries to engage with the future, and all those who inhabit it. It feels like the prize underlines the importance of this, and the community of that writing.”