Michael Ondaatje, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, John Burnside and Charlotte Shevchenko Knight are amongst many of the brilliant poets to make this year’s longlist for UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s global nature and ecopoetry prize – The Laurel Prize
UK Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, and the Poetry School, are delighted to announce the longlist 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 that year.
The longlist – judged this year by the poets Mona Arshi (Chair), Caroline Bird, and Kwame Dawes– is as follows (in alphabetical order):
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, winners will receive a commission from National Landscapes to create a poem based on their favourite UK landscape. |
This year’s Laurel Prize Ceremony will take place on Saturday 19 October at 5.30-6.30pm (BST), and there will be a free live-stream. Please email administration@poetryschool.com to register your interest for the ceremony’s live stream. This year the Ceremony is the highlight of first edition of Summit: A Poetry School Festival, a landmark celebration of ecopoetry, nature, and climate writing, realised in collaboration with University of Leeds Poetry Centre, the Laurel Prize, National Landscapes, the National Poetry Centre and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The festival brings together some of the UK’s most celebrated writers and ecological thinkers for two days of performances, workshops, poetry surgeries, and panel discussions. Summit’s ethos is centred around poetry, community, and action. The festival provides a vital space to consider how words, and worlds, are deeply connected, and what role poetry plays as we face up to immense biodiversity losses, habitat destruction, rising carbon emissions, and warming temperatures. |
On Saturday 19 October, Summit opens at Yorkshire Sculpture Park with a series of poetry workshops including Petro-Politics with Yvonne Reddick, Mingling Bodies with Caleb Parkin, and an introductory workshop, Starting to Write Nature Poetry, with Antony Dunn, as well as readings from Forward Prize winner and 2024 Laurel Prize judge Caroline Bird, and poets from the 2024 Laurel Prize Longlist. These readings will be followed by The Laurel Prize-giving ceremony.
On the second day of the festival, Sunday 20 October, Summit will move to the University of Leeds Poetry Centre, where events include an Introductory Climate Summit, with readings from Simon Armitage, and a discussion around the role of poetry, and the arts, amidst the climate crisis. Following this will be a series of panel readings with Helen Mort, Alycia Pirmohamed, Niall Campbell, Sean Borodale, Khairani Barokka, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, John Wedgwood Clarke and others. Panel themes include Blue Poetics, centered around the hydrosphere and its literary representation, Geo, Eco, Topo, exploring poetry and placemaking, and Toxic States, examining environmental damage and its effects across human and more-than-human interactions. The National Poetry Centre will close the festival with a special in-conversation event featuring Zaffar Kunial and Karen McCarthy Woolf.
Tickets are available via the Poetry School and Yorkshire Sculpture Park websites.
Mona Arshi 2024 Chair of JudgesPoet, Novelist & Essayist
“Once again the poets in the Laurel Prize demonstrate how vital it is t0 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.”