The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry, the biggest international prize for ecological, environmental and climate-concerned poetry, opens Friday 31st July 2020. Calling from poets around the world competing to win £5,000 (first prize), £2,000 (2nd prize) or £1,000 (3rd prize).
Organised by the Poetry School, and judged by novelist, activist and UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and poet, critic and commissioning editor Jade Cuttle. The Ginkgo Prize aims to illuminate the climate crisis and the role that poetry can play in provoking consciousness and change.
The competition encourages poets from all backgrounds and abilities to interrogate and explore our built and natural environments, to challenge the global climate crisis and celebrate ecological beauty by lending creative space to the writing of poetry.
To help applicants enter, Ginkgo has set up virtual workshops throughout the submissions period (31st July – 31st October 2020). These workshops aim to encourage the writing and understanding of ecopoetry. There will be essays from leading environmental writers and more workshops announced soon.
This year, they are launching a separate prize with the UK’s Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty – the theme will be Landscape, and the £500 prize will be awarded to The Best Poem of Landscape. This prize will be free to enter if a poem already submitted to the Gingko Prize qualifies as a landscape poem.
The winner of the Ginkgo Prize will be awarded a week-long glamping residency and bespoke rewilding workshop at Knepp Rewilding Safaris.