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Bushell wins Moth Nature Writing Prize
Alaskan writer Libby B Bushell has won the The Moth Nature Writing Prize for "Homage to a Halibut Eye" while Sheffield-based author Mark Lawler and Northern Ireland-born Mary-Jane Holmes have also been honoured.
The award was judged anonymously this year by nature author Kathleen Jamie.
She described Bushell’s story as “a different sort of nature-writing, literally visceral, it doesn’t tell us what to think but manages easily to horrify us with lived experience and first-hand knowledge of what we’re doing to the oceans". She added: “If it doesn’t make you pause and consider what you’re eating and where it came from, nothing will.”
Bushell is the founder of HoWL, a wilderness expedition camp for children. She also works as a waitress and wilderness guide and is writing her debut novel, Salty.
Bushell said the win “feels transformative”. She added: “Today, as I go about my normal routine, chatting with customers about the rockfish special or the blustery weather, I am the same but also new. With this prize, I am grateful and honoured to be part of an international literary community and I cannot wait to continue the conversations with you.”
Jamie chose Molly Lanzarotta’s poem, "Sending Texts During the Holocene Extinction" as her second prize-winner. Lanzarotta, who lives in Massachusetts, is widely published in magazines in the US.
The third prize has gone to Lawlor’s short story "Ride". Lawlor is a writer and visual artist originally from Ireland, but now based in Sheffield. He is widely published in magazines, won a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2021 and is currently writing a novel.
Bushell’s "Homage to a Halibut Eye" will be published in the pages of the Irish Times on 15th December, while the second and third prize-winning pieces are published today in the Irish Times online.
The first prize is €1,000 (£857) and a week at Circle of Missé, a retreat for writers and artists based in the Loire Valley in France. Second prize is €500 (£428) and third prize is €250 (£214).
Jamie also commended a poem by Detroit-born poet, choreographer, dancer, performance artist and educator Ariel Mokdad, and two poems by Holmes.
The annual Moth Poetry Prize, one of the biggest in the world for unpublished poems, will close for submissions on 31st December with an €11,000 (£9,400) prize fund for 12 winners, judged this year by poet and academic Hannah Sullivan.
