Longlist announced for UK Poet Laureate’s 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):
Rachael Allen God Complex (Faber & Faber)
Janette Ayachi QuickFire, Slow Burning (Pavilion Poetry)
Dylan Brennan Let the Dead (Banshee Press)
Will Burns Natural Burial Ground (Little, Brown Book Group)
John Burnside Ruin, Blossom (Jonathan Cape)
Hannah Copley Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry)
R K Fauth A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees (Texas Tech University Press)
Isabel Galleymore Baby Schema (Carcanet Press)
Seán Hewitt Rapture’s Road (Jonathan Cape)
Ian Humphreys Tormentil (Nine Arches Press)
Megan Kitching At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press)
Charlotte Shevchenko Knight Food for the Dead (Jonathan Cape)
David Nash No Man’s Land (The Dedalus Press)
Michael Ondaatje A Year of Last Things (Jonathan Cape)
K Patrick Three Births (Granta Books)
Rowan Ricardo Phillips Silver (Faber & Faber)
Robyn Maree Pickens Tung (Otago University Press)
Maya C. Popa Wound is the Origin of Wonder (Pan Macmillan)
Taz Rahman East of the Sun, West of the Moon (Seren Books)
Brian Turner The Wild Delight of Wild Things (Alice James Books)
Becky Varley-Winter Dangerous Enough (Salt Press)
The shortlist will be announced on Monday 7 October, so please keep your eyes peeled. 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 5.30-6.30 pm (BST), and there will be a free live-stream. This year it 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.
