The Moth Nature Writing Prize 2024, judged anonymously by Cal Flyn, has been awarded to three outstanding pieces of nature writing in prose and poetry.
The British writer, researcher and naturalist, Anna Selby, is the first prize winner with her poem, Acairseid Mhòr, Gometra – “a powerful, understated piece that gets across the viscerality and the intimacy of the farmer’s relationship with their livestock,” said Flyn, “with shades of Seamus Heaney and Edwin Morgan; melancholic and delicately phrased.”
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.
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“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.”
Acairseid Mhòr, Gometra
The tide is rising and the one boat has gone out.
A human animal steps sideways down a slip,
kelp flicks out like an oar beside her, she
grips a rope through green grapes and dill.
A ram is dying behind her.
She has been lying with him for hours, the tup
looking into her eyes, resting his there,
his chin cupped in her palm so she can scratch it.
The line, submerged now, is dangled with streamers.
He is lay in his own urine, his own shit.
The human animal was covered in it.
She has peeled her clothes off in the boatshed.
The seawrack is at the edges swilling and inflating.
It moves round and round, surrounding her.
She lets the seawater fill her hands,
reluctant to go deeper
because of the story of the basking sharks,
here in the harbour,
two of them, turning in circles,
mouths big as tables – but they didn’t say
what kind – card table, dining, bedside?
She’d told them she was going to swim,
but really she’s washing
for the first time in over a week.
She pushes the seawater into her armcups,
her own whelks, raising her teats
rubbing under them, her nipples the colour
of red seawrack. She walks back to the shed,
wet skin dripping,
hides the gun by her side,
brings it up over his head, metal
pointed at a bony cleft.
The rifle: a long and thin needle.
Something massive rises inside her.
The animal holds the smaller animal,
carries him in her arms like an old wedding dress,
blood trickling down her midriff, her thighs,
trailing between the dulse, the wrack;
the sea lifts him.
Cal Flyn chose Glasgow ecologist Paul Walton’s Tick Mop as her second prize winner, describing it as “a brilliant battle cry to resound through the glens. I enjoyed its dark humour and hard-won knowledge, and its batting-for-the-boundaries ambition.”
“Through good luck and accident I got to follow the career path that nine-year-old me wanted,” Walton said. “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.”
Third prize goes to Karen Holmberg’s poem Iridescence, for “the carefully deployed language, the sense of poetry in science, the vividness of language and imagery”.
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.
The 1st prize is €1,000 and a week at Circle of Missé, a retreat for writers and artists in the Loire Valley in France, 2nd prize is €500, and 3rd prize €250.
Flyn also highly commended work by Robert Ward, who teaches at Brown University; Sarah Dewey, an oceanographer and writer living in Washington DC; and Kizziah Burton, an LA-based poet who recently won the Montreal International Poetry Prize.
The next deadline to look out for from The Moth is December 31st, for the annual Moth Poetry Prize, one of the biggest in the world for unpublished poems, with an €11,000 prize fund for 12 winners, judged this year by multi-award-winning poet Fiona Benson.
