UK Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, and the Poetry School, are delighted to announce the shortlist 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 shortlist, 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 live stream. This year the Ceremony is the highlight of the first edition of Summit: A Poetry School Festival, a landmark live 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 including Will Burns, Ian Humphreys, Janette Ayachi, David Nash, Taz Rahman and Rebecca Varley-Winter. 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 YSP websites.
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.”