Genevieve
Carver’s ‘Postcards from a Fulmar’ has been chosen by Max Porter as the winner
of The Moth Nature Writing Prize 2022.
‘Being chosen by Max Porter as the winner of The Moth Nature Writing Prize is huge for me – especially for work from my residency with the University of Aberdeen, as it highlights the important research they are doing into these incredible birds, and shows what can happen when arts and sciences work together.’ Genevieve Carver
Genevieve Carver’s
poetry has been published in journals including Mslexia, The
White Review, The North, The London Magazine, Magma and Poetry
News. Her first collection, A Beautiful Way to be Crazy (Verve
Poetry Press, 2020), was based on a gig theatre production in collaboration
with multi-instrumentalist live band The Unsung, and her pamphlet, Landsick, explores
themes of connectivity and discord between humans and the natural world (Broken
Sleep Books, forthcoming 2023). She’s currently Poet in Residence with the
University of Aberdeen’s School of Biological Sciences, where she’s observing
and writing in response to their work studying bottlenose dolphin, porpoise and
harbour seals in the Moray Firth, as well as the fulmar colony on the
uninhabited island of Eynhallow in Orkney.
‘It’s such
an interesting and surprising hybrid, which manages to be deeply funny and very
sad at the same time, an unusual feat in both science writing and poetry, even
more unusual when the two are blended. The ironic and the tender are perfectly
fused, and formal innovations are cleverly tethered to meaning. Both the birds
and the language were thrillingly ‒ and in unexpected ways ‒ alive in
this piece.’ Max Porter
MAX PORTER ALSO COMMENDED THE FOLLOWING
The Whale by Susannah Dickey
‘The kind of story you read and
then go and hunt down more of the author’s work. A totally superb short story.
Not a wasted word. Utterly imprinted on my mind.’
Susannah
Dickey grew up in Derry and now lives in London. She is the author of four
poetry pamphlets. Her poetry has been published in the TLS, Poetry
London and Poetry Ireland Review. Her short fiction has been
published in The Dublin Review and The White Review. In 2019 she
won the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, and in 2021 she was longlisted for the
Sunday Times Short Story Award. She is an Eric Gregory Award winner, a prize
granted for a collection by poets under the age of 30. Her debut poetry
collection, Isdal, will be published in 2023. She is the author of the
novels Tennis Lessons and Common Decency, both published by
Doubleday UK.
'Actual Poem' by Leah Naomi Green
‘A carefully wrought and
startlingly beautiful poem in which huge cycles of human and non-human meaning
and experience turn under the apparently intimate question-to-self, and
connections between the body and the world are startlingly illuminated.’
Leah
Naomi Green is the author of The More Extravagant Feast (Graywolf
Press), selected by Li-Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of
American Poets and named ‘one of the best books of 2020’ by The Boston Globe.
She received the 2021 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award as well an Academy of
American Poets 2021 Climate Action Poetry Prize. Her work, which has appeared in
The Paris Review, Tin House, Poem-a-Day, VQR, The
Southern Review and Orion, among other publications, has been
featured on NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ and supported by fellowships from the
Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Green
teaches environmental studies and English at Washington and Lee University. She
lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia where she and her family homestead and
grow or find much of their food for the year.
Bucolic by Lance Larsen
‘Instantly and unmistakably the
work of a great poet. Unforgettable images, a tremendous rhythm and energy in
the line, a poem which demands to be read aloud and lingers long after.’
Lance
Larsen has published five poetry collections, most recently What the
Body Knows (Tampa 2018). His awards include a Pushcart Prize, an NEA
fellowship, the 2021 Sewanee Review Prize, and the 2022 Alpine
Fellowship Prize. He teaches at Brigham Young University and likes to fool
around with aphorisms: ‘A woman needs a man the way a manatee needs a
glockenspiel.’ In 2017, he completed a five-year appointment as poet laureate
of Utah. Sometimes he juggles.
Earth Tongue by Sammy Weaver
‘Brings the personal, the poetic
and the fungal together in a profoundly generative way. Clearly the result of
deep thinking and a beautifully accomplished freedom of movement between poetry
and prose.’
Sammy
Weaver is a poet from Hay-on-Wye, currently based in West Yorkshire. She has a
Creative Writing MA from Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poems have
appeared in The Moth, The Island Review and Anthropocene,
and have been anthologised widely. She won The Moth Nature Writing Prize in
2020. She was shortlisted for a Northern Writers’ Award for poetry and Nine
Arches Press’ Primers scheme in 2021. Her pamphlet, Angola,
America (Seren), won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize 2021.
ABOUT THE PRIZE
‘What a great competition to be running.’ Robert
Macfarlane
The Moth Nature Writing Prize
aims to encourage and celebrate the art of nature writing. It is awarded
annually to an unpublished piece of prose or poetry which best combines
exceptional literary merit with an exploration of the writer’s relationship
with the natural world.
The prize is open to anyone over
the age of sixteen, as long as the work is original and previously
unpublished.
Each year a single judge is
asked to choose one winner from entries worldwide.
As of 2023, there will be three winners (1st €1,000 plus a week at
Circle of Misse; 2nd €500, 3rd €250), all to be published
in the Irish Times online.
Previous judges include Richard
Mabey, Helen Macdonald and Max Porter.
