‘We are facing the most catastrophic threat to the future of our planet that we have ever encountered.’
Over the course of my ten year Laureateship I want one of the headline projects to be a prize or award that recognises and encourages the resurgence of nature and environmental writing, currently taking place in poetry.
The new wave of nature writing in non-fiction has been well documented over recent years but not enough attention has been paid to a similar move in poetry, with climate crisis and environmental concerns clearly provoking this important strand of work.
I have established The Laurel Prize as an annual award for the best collection of nature or environmental poetry to highlight the climate crisis and raise awareness of the challenges and potential solutions at this critical point in our planet’s life.
In celebrating and rewarding this work, the Prize aims to encourage more of it, and to become part of the discourse and awareness about our current environmental predicament.
Building on the success of its inaugural year, the Laurel Prize will now become an international award for nature poetry written in English. This is also a way of recognising the global importance of environmentalism, and drawing together concerned voices from across the planet.
I will donate my annual Laureate Honorarium of £5,000 towards the prize money each year.
Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate.
The Laurel Prize
First Prize – £5,000
Second Prize – £2,000
Third Prize – £1,000
Prize for Best First Collection – £500
Prize for Best International First Collection – £500
(Sponsored by The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry)
Our Judges
Mona Arshi is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Mona trained as a human rights lawyer at Liberty before she started writing poetry, which she studied at the University of East Anglia. Her debut collection, Small Hands, won the Forward Prize for the best first collection in 2015. She has also been a prize-winner in the Magma, Troubadour, and Manchester creative writing competitions. Her second collection, Dear Big Gods, was published in 2019 (both books published by Liverpool University Press’s Pavilion Poetry list). Her writing has been published in The Times, The Guardian, Granta, The Yale Review, and The Times of India, as well as on the London Underground. She was a writer-in-residence at Cley Marshes in Norfolk, and during lockdown, she spent time in the area working on poems that were transformed into digital assets and embedded in the landscape. In 2020, she was appointed Honorary Professor at the University of Liverpool, and she is currently a fellow in creative writing at Trinity College, Cambridge, a position she will hold until September 2024. Her novel has appeared on the Jhalak, Desmond Elliot, and Republic of Consciousness prize lists and most recently was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.
Photo credit: Karolina Heller
Caroline Bird’s selected poems, Rookie (2022), and The Air Year (2020) are two of Carcanet’s most popular books of the present decade. She won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2020, and has been shortlisted for a number of prizes including the TS Eliot Prize, the Costa Book Awards, the Ted Hughes Award, the Polari Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. A two-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was fifteen. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023. Her latest collection, Ambush at Still Lake, will be published in July 2024.
Kwame Dawes is the author of numerous books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent collection is Sturge Town (Peepal Tree Press, UK 2023). Dawes is a George W. Holmes University Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner. He teaches in the Pacific MFA Program and is the Series Editor of the African Poetry Book Series, Director of the African Poetry Book Fund, and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Kwame Dawes is the winner of the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2022 Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the Government of Jamaica.
Our Judges
Mona Arshi is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Mona trained as a human rights lawyer at Liberty before she started writing poetry, which she studied at the University of East Anglia. Her debut collection, Small Hands, won the Forward Prize for the best first collection in 2015. She has also been a prize-winner in the Magma, Troubadour, and Manchester creative writing competitions. Her second collection, Dear Big Gods, was published in 2019 (both books published by Liverpool University Press’s Pavilion Poetry list). Her writing has been published in The Times, The Guardian, Granta, The Yale Review, and The Times of India, as well as on the London Underground. She was a writer-in-residence at Cley Marshes in Norfolk, and during lockdown, she spent time in the area working on poems that were transformed into digital assets and embedded in the landscape. In 2020, she was appointed Honorary Professor at the University of Liverpool, and she is currently a fellow in creative writing at Trinity College, Cambridge, a position she will hold until September 2024. Her novel has appeared on the Jhalak, Desmond Elliot, and Republic of Consciousness prize lists and most recently was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.
Caroline Bird’s selected poems, Rookie (2022), and The Air Year (2020) are two of Carcanet’s most popular books of the present decade. She won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2020, and has been shortlisted for a number of prizes including the TS Eliot Prize, the Costa Book Awards, the Ted Hughes Award, the Polari Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. A two-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was fifteen. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023. Her latest collection, Ambush at Still Lake, will be published in July 2024.
Kwame Dawes is the author of numerous books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent collection is Sturge Town (Peepal Tree Press, UK 2023). Dawes is a George W. Holmes University Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner. He teaches in the Pacific MFA Program and is the Series Editor of the African Poetry Book Series, Director of the African Poetry Book Fund, and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Kwame Dawes is the winner of the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2022 Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the Government of Jamaica.
Our Partners
Poetry School is a registered charity and a proud member of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio Organisations.
The Prize is supported by the Poet Laureate’s Honorarium, a Founder Patron and lover of poetry and a variety of other individual donors and trusts and foundations. Without their generosity, the Prize would not be possible.
Logo designed by Clive Hicks-Jenkins