The longlist for The Laurel Prize 2024 has been announced and two of our poets have made the list! At the Point of Seeing by Megan Kitching and Tung by Robyn Maree Pickens were longlisted for this year's prize.
The Laurel Prize is an annual prize awarded to the best collection of environmental or nature poetry published each year. This year's judges are the poets Mona Arshi (Chair), Caroline Bird, and Kwame Dawes. 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. The shortlist will be announced on Monday 7 October and The Laurel Prize Ceremony will take place on Saturday 19 October from 5.30-6.30 pm (BST), available to watch via a free live stream.
At the Point of Seeing is the extraordinary debut collection from Ōtepoti Dunedin poet Megan Kitching. Poised, richly observant and deftly turned, Kitching's poems bestow a unique attention upon the world. Her eye is finely attuned to the well-trodden yet overlooked – the places between 'dirt and thumb' or 'together and alone' – and especially the weedy, overgrown and pest-infested places where the human impulses to name, control and colonise meet nature's life force and wild exuberance. These compelling poems urge the reader to slow down and give space to the living, moving, breathing environment that surrounds them.
Tung is the keenly anticipated debut collection from award-winning Ōtepoti-Dunedin poet, Robyn Maree Pickens. Earth-centred and life-affirming, these poems offer sustenance and repair to a planet in the grips of a socio-ecological crisis. Pickens is an eco-pioneer of words, attuned to the fine murmurings of the earth and to the louder sound and content of human languages (English, Spanish, Japanese and Finnish). She finds and draws out the beauty in both. Tung is not afraid of new shapes or new rhythms, orchestrating a gorgeous score that testifies to the shared relationship between the human and non-human worlds. Over the roar and the din, Robyn Maree Pickens creates her sound. And it sounds like hope.
A huge congratulations to Megan Kitching and Robyn Maree Pickens!
Find out more about At the Point of Seeing here.
Find out more about Tung here.
Find out more about The Laurel Prize here.