Nature and Place 2021 winners announced

We have now received the results of the 2021 Nature and Place Poetry Competition back from Daljit Nagra and are delighted to announce that the winners are:

1st Prize of £1000 – ‘They say you sleep 1/3 of your life in the dark with animals’ by Simon Costello
2nd Prize of £500 – ‘the eighteenth brumaire’ – Dipanjali Roy
3rd Prize of £250 – ‘Marshall Mount Road at Dusk’ – Peter Ramm
Additional Prize of A personal tour of Wicken Fen with Nick Davies  -‘Reasons for Sanderlings’ by Jane Lovell

The four prize winning poems will be published in issue 97 of The Rialto.

Daljit also selected eight highly commended poems:

‘Sexing Chicks’ by Ali Lewis
‘Feeding my period blood to the Wordsworths’ garden’ by Anna Selby
‘Psalm’ by David Underdown
‘Puir Finch’ by Douglas McKenzie
‘Route Canal’ by Mantra Mukim
‘Wolves of Chernobyl’ by Ned Balbo
‘Magpie’ by Rich Ware
‘The Bowl’ by Tristram Fane Saunders

The link to the Long List below is not a list of all the poems submitted to the competition, it lists those poems that were still in the running right to up to the late stages of the judging. Please don’t be disheartened if your work doesn’t appear on this list! Once again, we had a huge response to the competition, receiving around 3100 poems from 1500 poets.

The quality of the writing submitted and the deep engagement with our theme is always astonishing and indeed heartening. Every poem entered makes a difference to nature and poetry. Many thanks to Daljit and Nick Davies for their generosity in working with us and indeed to all of you who entered.

We will shortly be announcing details of the free online event that will feature a reading by Daljit Nagra and our winners. This is planned for Wednesday 7th July. Further details will be announced in due course.