White Horse Bookshop sponsors nature writing prize

The White Horse Bookshop is sponsoring the Richard Jefferies Society Writers’ Prize while the book trade is experiencing a “golden age of nature writing”.

The White Horse Bookshop in Marlborough will now take on sponsorship of the Richard Jefferies Society Writers’ Prize for Outstanding Nature Writing, which awards the winner £1,000, and is currently accepting submissions.

Angus MacLennan, general manager of the White Horse Bookshop, said: “It is obvious from the breadth and quality of publishing I see represented on our shelves every day that we are in a golden age of nature writing. This, coupled with our location at the foot of the Marlborough Downs, an area Richard Jefferies wrote about, made sponsoring the prize a very easy decision.”

Named after the celebrated and ground-breaking Victorian writer and naturalist, the prize was first awarded in March of this year to John Lister-Kaye for Gods of the Morning (Canongate).

The winner of the second Richard Jefferies Society Writers’ Prize will be announced at a ceremony in the 73-year-old bookshop’s new events room in Spring 2017 next year.

John Price, chairman of the Richard Jefferies Society, said: “We are thrilled to have found such a perfect sponsor so soon in the prize’s life – it seems, fittingly, to be a very natural evolution. Richard Jefferies was a Wiltshire man and would have known the area well – I am sure he would thoroughly approve of our new sponsor and of the shop’s support of nature writing and writers.”

The prize is open to nature writing of any length or in any format that is broadly consistent with the work of Richard Jefferies. Submissions may include first English translations and all entries must have been published, for the first time, within the calendar year.