We have now received the results of the 2026 Nature and Place Poetry Competition back from Mona Arshi and are delighted to announce that the winners are:
1st Prize of £1000 – ‘Epithalamion with honesty (lunaria annua)’ – Rachel Curzon
2nd Prize of £500 – ‘Leveret in October’ – Polly Atkin
3rd Prize of £250 – ‘Compost’ – Tom Nutting
The three prize winning poems will be published in issue 104 of The Rialto.
Mona also selected five highly commended poems:
‘Nocturne on the Yare with Grasshopper Warblers’ – Matt Haw
‘I’ve Been Walking This Same Forest Trail For Fifty Years’ – Ellery Akers
‘Isfahan’ – Holly Quilter
‘The Snake’ – Ella Frears
‘Sonnet for the Red List for Vascular Plants’ – Sophie F Baker
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 3600 poems from 1700 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 Mona for her generosity in working with us and indeed to all of you who entered.
We will shortly be announcing details of an event that will feature a reading by Mona Arshi and our winners. This is being planned for later in the summer and will be hosted by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative for an in-person audience. The event will be free, and it will also be possible to watch the event online (livestream only). Further details will be announced in due course.
The long list
Please be aware the long list is only representative of a part of the process of selection and does not include all entrants. The judging is a difficult process of elimination, from the thousands of poems received one hundred or so poems go on to the long list, a short list is then compiled and from that a list of winners and highly commended poems.
We are grateful for all submissions, the standard this year was exceptional.
| Yorkshire Fog | Alice Huntley |
| We buy our picnic from Esso | Alison Tanik |
| Going Into Town | Alyson Hallett |
| March & Everything | Alyson Hallett |
| Three Pyres | Amelia Urry |
| Skyjournal 10.10 | Andrew Wells |
| Survivors | Ann Westgarth |
| Exit Count at Dusk, 80 kHz | Anna Selby |
| Night Rockpooling on the Lowest Tide of the Year | Anna Selby |
| Adrigole, Beara, Cork | Austin Crowley |
| Signs that times are changing at Winter’s Cross | Bernadette Lynch |
| Awakens as Jayself | Caleb Parkin |
| Meeting Monarch | Caleb Parkin |
| Specimen #2037 | Cara Waterfall |
| The Cherwell curls its lip | Carl Tomlinson |
| Comparative thanatology | Cheryl Moskowitz |
| The Watcher-Walker on the Pale Chalk Path | Christopher Nield |
| Portrait of a Banana Tree | Courtney Conrad |
| The Sussex Downs | David Wakely |
| Horsey Gap, December | Davinia Hamilton |
| “i loved you in all those rewilding places” | Dean Gessie |
| Window | Derval Tubridy |
| Zacuscă recipe | Dragana Lazici |
| The Dream Director | Eamonn O’Sullivan |
| vultures will only care about me when i’m dead, or dying, or sick | Elia Isaac |
| Islands | Elizabeth Osmond |
| The Snake | Ella Frears |
| I’ve Been Walking This Same Forest Trail for Fifty Years | Ellery Akers |
| Leighton Moss | Elliot Ruff |
| The Ducks in Feltham | Em Power |
| And we didn’t think | Emily Vanderploeg |
| Penguins Norwegian | Eric Brown |
| Three times a doctor asks a map of the Isle of Dogs to ‘open wide’ | Estelle Price |
| A Small Sample of Unmaking | Eve Jackson |
| Everymouse | Helen Evans |
| Isfahan | Holly Quilter |
| Excavation at Junction 6 | Jack Faricy |
| Taigh Cuimhne | James Gately |
| Wisdom | Jen Feroze |
| This Hurt | Jeri Onitskansky |
| Bluebells in Whippendell Woods | John Saddler |
| We have done hellish things | Julie Runacres |
| Boletaire | Julie Sheridan |
| notes from the end of the world | Karan Chambers |
| Shadows | Katherine Heneghan |
| Galway Morning | Kathryn Petruccelli |
| Wild and Free | Katie Donovan |
| Ode To a Particular Smell’s Interlocution With My Cells | Kerry Rawlinson |
| Iceland | Kitty Donnelly |
| Otterly Fabulous | Kristina Diprose |
| Poem In Which I Have Caught A Criminal Mastermind | Laura Theis |
| Jellyfish Blues | Lisa Kelly |
| Somewhere off the coast; Baltimore, Ireland | Lucas Smith |
| Becoming the Leven Estuary | Lucy Prescott |
| Ritual | Mairghread McLundie |
| Primitive Thoughts | Mark de Klerk |
| Nocturne on the Yare with Grasshopper Warblers | Matt Haw |
| Heath Crepuscle | Meryl Pugh |
| Notes toward an Architecture | Michael Dooley |
| Lyric | Michael Dooley |
| A Bleeding Woman | Miriam Swales |
| Floodplain | Mollie Knox |
| Spunky, the Polar Bear, Speaks | Molly Twomey |
| Ballad of the Verge | Morag Smith |
| Cuppa | Nairn Kennedy |
| Lambing | Natalie Ann Holborow |
| Train Dreams from Kyiv | Neal Hoskins |
| Conversation with a (paid)planning ecologist | Ness Owen |
| Lough Neagh | Nicokla Heaney |
| On finding ladybirds in Nuneaton Art Gallery | Olga Dermott-Bond |
| Beewolf not to be confused with Beowulf | Paul Fenn |
| Sloth | Pete Mullineuax |
| Leveret in October | Polly Atkin |
| Between Mists | Pratibha Rai |
| yakshi does echolocation | Prerana Kumar |
| Box of Beetles | Rachel Bower |
| epithalamion with honesty (lunaria annua) | Rachel Curzon |
| The formula for missing | Rachel R. Baum |
| Above Us | Richard Whiting |
| Ink on Whale Ivory | Ruth Lexton |
| Seeing God | Ruth Sharman |
| The Lithium Heart of the Dear Green Place | Sahar Azar |
| Turned Earth Never Forgets | Samuel Prince |
| The Wave | Sarah Barr |
| Workaday | Sarah Wolfson |
| Mid-time end times lovesong pastoral | Sarah Wolfson |
| Steady Son | Sean Swallow |
| Coming Out to Sea | Shakeema Edwards |
| Whimbrel | Shirley Nicholson |
| Swedish Death Cleaning: A prcitcal Guide to Leaving Less Behind | Siobhán Flynn |
| A Week in Banff | Sneha Madhavan-Reese |
| Reflections on Courage | Sophia Argyris |
| The Paths | Sophie F Baker |
| Sonnet for The Red List for Vascular Plants | Sophie F Baker |
| Marmalade | Steph Ellen Feeney |
| Desert House | Tim Relf |
| Compost | Tom Nutting |
| Tide’s Maramataka | Topher Shields |
| Houseflies | Victoria Spires |
| The World, A Brief Dream Under A Summer Moon | Wes Lee |