The Moth Magazine

‘A powerful, understated piece that gets across the viscerality and the intimacy of the farmer’s relationship with their livestock, with shades of Seamus Heaney and Edwin Morgan; melancholic and delicately phrased.’ Cal Flyn

Anna Selby is a Lecturer in Engaged Ecology and Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College in Devon. She is a former Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry judge and editor at Hazel Press, and is currently pursuing a PhD on Empathy, Ecology and Plein Air Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. She specialises in intersectional environmentalism, poetry in translation, international activist and environmental writing ‒ formerly working at the UK’s first Literature House, The National Centre for Writing, and as Literature and Spoken Word Programmer at Southbank Centre, where she organised the largest poetry festival in the world, Poetry Parnassus.

Anna has been Writer-in-Residence at Cambridge Conservation Initiative, The Wordsworth Trust and Wealden Literary Festival. Her poetry often explores our connection with water and the living world. She writes poetic studies of different species in situ, directly from life, often underwater or at sea, and aims for these poems to share a sense of compassion and attentiveness to the environment. She also works on cross-artform, poetry-dance and multi-disciplinary pieces that tour the UK, and collaborates with dancers, choreographers and conservationists. Her most recent chapbook, Field Notes, written in and under the Atlantic Ocean over three years (using waterproof notebooks) was a bestseller for two years running with The London Review of Books Bookshop, was featured on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and was an Irish Times Book of the Year.

‘Winning The Moth Nature Writing Prize with a poem written on the first UK island to declare a climate emergency is an honour that feels rooted in place. Composed at the meeting point of land and rising sea, next to its subject, with waves between my toes, the poem is both a lament and a testament to the beauty of farmed animals, and the vulnerability and persistence of the living world. In A Sandy County Almanac Aldo Leopold wrote, “We grieve only for what we know. The erasure of Silphium from western Dane County is no cause for grief if one knows it only as a name in a botany book.” To have this poem recognized by Cal Flynn underscores the power of creative works and their potency in the environmental crisis; to offer attention, compassion, connection, grief and hope.’ Anna Selby

Read Acairseid Mhòr, Gometra
Watch Anna read Acairseid Mhòr, Gometra here

2^nd PRIZE | TICK MOP by PAUL WALTON

‘A brilliant battle cry to resound through the glens. I enjoyed its dark humour and hard-won knowledge, and it's batting-for-the-boundaries ambition.’ Cal Flyn

Paul Walton is an ecologist from Glasgow. He has spent his life studying nature but has a creeping sense that he understands less now than he did when he was nine. He spent formative years in Livingston, a concrete jungle between Glasgow and Edinburgh, birding and looking for fossils and feeling lonesome among the surrounding shale-bings and shelterbelts. He left at 17, spent a year as a farm labourer in Crete, was an estate worker and grouse beater in the Central Highlands, a forestry contractor and creel-boat crew in the West Highlands, before studying Zoology at Aberdeen University. He gained, after some digressions, a PhD in marine ecology. He spent years looking at and thinking about tysties in Orkney, and Arctic terns, kittiwakes, guillemots and shags in Shetland. He undertook long ecological surveys in the Middle East, Borneo and the Western Himalayas. Since then, he has spent 20 years working for nature conservation NGOs, arguing for a better relationship between humans and the rest of biodiversity.

‘Through good luck and accident I got to follow the career path that nine-year-old me wanted. But still I feel clueless. A paper was published this week announcing the global extinction of the slender-billed curlew. Why is there no functioning nature ethic in our society? I don’t know. I am not sure I believe in a lost connection to nature that our ancestors had, in an Arcadian past. I do believe that people today are the unwitting curators of all future life.’ Paul Walton

Read Tick Mop
Watch Paul read Tick Mop here

3^rd PRIZE | IRIDESCENCE by KAREN HOLMBERG

‘I loved the carefully deployed language, the sense of poetry in science, the vividness of language and imagery.’ Cal Flyn

Born and raised in Southeastern Connecticut on an estuarial cove, Karen Holmberg’s childhood was inflected by water and the swarming life it supported; boats, animals (a geriatric horse, goats, rabbits, chickens, dogs, iguanas, guinea pigs, cockatiels, a tame skunk named Right Guard), field collecting missions with her biologist father, numerous inscrutable elders (her grandparents and seven great aunts and uncles who all lived on a steep road leading to the family orchard), vegetable gardening, canning and preserving, houseplant collecting, and books. Her life pivoted from studying poetry to making it. She completed her MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and then a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. She has published a young adult novel and two collections of poetry, The Perseids and Axis Mundi, and individual poems and essays in such magazines as New England Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Poetry East, and Black Warrior Review. She also writes and publishes art criticism. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon, where she teaches poetry, literature and letterpress printing at Oregon State’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and where she delights in foraging mushrooms, eco-printing, seed-saving and fermenting foods.

‘The poetry critic Jonathan Farmer once said of me, “Armed with a biologist’s lexicon, she feels a little like the amateur scientists of an earlier century ‒ people implicitly authorized to explore everything around them.” This feels accurate.’ Karen Holmberg

Read Iridescence
Watch Karen read Iridescence here

HIGHLY COMMENDED

FLUTTERING by ROBERT WARD
Originally from the South Wales Valleys, Rob Ward now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife and their two border terriers. He teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University, where his courses include Nature Writing and the Art of Craft.

MARGINALIA by SARAH DEWEY
Dr Sarah Dewey is an oceanographer and writer living in Washington DC, USA. She has published in numerous academic journals as well as Seattle Business magazine. Her greatest joys are spending time in conversation and company with loved ones; learning about the world; and walking in nature with her dog.

WILD STRAWBERRIES by Kizziah Burton
Kizziah Burton's poems have shortlisted for the Forward Prize and highly commended in the National Poetry Competition, and she recently won the Montreal International Poetry Prize. She has been awarded educational grants from the American Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Foundation.

ABOUT THE PRIZE

The Moth Nature Writing Prize aims to encourage and celebrate the art of nature writing. It is awarded annually to three unpublished pieces of prose or poetry which best combine 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 winners from entries worldwide, and the prize is judged anonymously.

PRIZES

1^st prize €1,000 plus a week at Circle of Misse in France.

2^nd prize €500

3^rd €250

‘If you are engaged with being alive on this planet just now … and you are not terrified about the future half the time, you are not paying attention.’ Max Porter (2022 judge)

‘I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness.’ Helen Macdonald (2021 judge)

‘The answer to the still present threat of a silent spring is for us to sing against the storm.’ Richard Mabey (2020 judge)

‘What a great competition to be running.’ Robert Macfarlane

‘The Moth Nature Writing Prize is my first piece published outside the small circulation of my alma mater and hometown publications. As such, it feels transformative. 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.’ Libby B Bushell

‘It gives me so much confidence and it is wonderful to have my writing out there and enjoyed by others.’ Sammy Weaver (2020 winner)

‘I am eternally grateful, however much of eternity I have left in me.’ Arne Weingart (2021 winner)

With thanks to Circle of Misse.

Call 00 353 87 2657251 or email enquiries@themothmagazine.com for more details. The prize will open again in April 2025.