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 UK's National Landscapes have partnered with Poetry School on the Laurel Prize for the past four years, and this year's array of longlisted collection maintains the outstanding high quality.

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)
John Burnside Ruin Blossom (Jonathan Cape)
Will Burns Natural Burial Ground (Little Brown Book Group)
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)
Rowan Ricardo Phillips Silver (Faber & Faber)
K Patrick Three Births (Granta Books)
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 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 receive a commission from National Landscapes to create a poem based on their favourite National Landscape.

This year’s Laurel Prize Ceremony will take place on Saturday 19 October at 5.30-6.30pm (GMT), and there will be a free live-stream.

This year it is the highlight of of the 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.

Chair of Judges, Poet, Novelist and Essayist Mona Arshi said of the longlist: "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."