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Harvard University academic Jorie Graham has scooped the 2023 Laurel Prize, the global nature and ecopoetry award created by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage worth £5,000.
The prize is funded by 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.
Graham took the top prize for To 2040 (Carcanet Press). Her poetry has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize (UK), the Los Angeles Times Book Award among others. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard University.
Hebden Bridge-based poet Zaffar Kunial won second prize, worth £2,000, for England’s Green (Faber) while the £1,000 third prize went to Holly Hopkins, a writer based in Manchester, for The English Summer (Penned in The Margins).
The best UK first collection was awarded to TLS book critic Yvonne Reddick’s Burning Season (Bloodaxe Books), also based in Manchester, while Liza Katz, a teacher in New Jersey, took best international first collection for Duncan Given (Autumn House Press). Both awards are worth £500.
Additionally each of the winners will receive a commission from the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty to create a poem based on their favourite landscape.
The winners were judged this year by journalist and presenter Reeta Chakrabarti and the poets Pascale Petit and Nick Laird, with Petit acting as chair.
Graham said of her win: "It is a singular honor to have To 2040 included —among so many powerful books—as a finalist for The Laurel Prize. Being able to take our future (and our careening present at its tipping points) in hand begins with being able to take it in mind. The Laurel Prize brilliantly grasps and celebrates urgent acts of imagination which seek to awaken us to our planet’s realities."
The Poetry School runs both the Laurel and Ginkgo Prizes for nature and ecopoetry and is a poetry education and talent development organisation.