About the Competition
The Rialto working with the RSPB, BirdLife International and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative
Poems are invited that deal with any aspect of nature and place and will be given a very wide interpretation by the judge.
Prizes
1st prize – £1000
2nd prize – £500
3rd prize – A place on a creative writing course at Ty Newydd Writing Centre in 2017
Two Additional Prizes
A personal tour with Mark Cocker of his most cherished wildlife places in East Anglia.
A personal tour with Nick Davies of his beloved Wicken Fen to learn about his research there.
Tŷ Newydd (Third Prize) National Writing Centre of Wales and offers an impressive range of Creative Writing courses in the beautiful coastal surroundings of north-west Wales. (www.tynewydd.wales).*
Mark Cocker is one of Britain’s most celebrated writers on nature. He is author of the magnificent Birds and People as well as the award winning Crow Country and Birds Britannica. He writes and broadcasts regularly in national media and his column in The Guardian has run for more than 25 years.
Nick Davies is Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Cambridge. For many years his work has focused on the evolutionary battle between cuckoos and their hosts and has been based at Wicken Fen in Cambridge. In 2015 Nick published Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature, a book David Attenborough describes as, ‘an amazing detective story by one of the country’s greatest field naturalists’.
Judge
Kathleen Jamie
Kathleen Jamie was born in the west of Scotland. Her poetry collections to date include The Overhaul, which won the 2012 Costa Poetry Prize, and The Tree House, which won both the Forward Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year Award. For the last decade Kathleen Jamie has also written non-fiction concerning land, nature and culture: she is author of the highly regarded Findings and Sightlines. Her most recent collection The Bonniest Companie appeared in 2015. Kathleen is Chair of Poetry at the University of Stirling.
Submitting Your Poems
You can submit up to six poems in one batch, the first poem includes an administration fee.
If you wish to submit more than six poems you will need to make a second submission which will include a second submission fee.
Please note we require poems to be sent as either as a Adobe PDF or a Microsoft Word .doc or a .docx. Please paste all your poems into one file which you can upload on the submission page after you’ve made your payment. You must retain your Paypal Transaction ID and enter it on the form and fill in all the required fields.
Competition Rules
- Closing date of the Competition is midnight on March 1 2017.
- The Competition is open to anyone over the age of 18, other than Rialto team members and staff of the RSPB, CCI and UK staff of BirdLife International.
- Poems must have a title and must be no more than 40 lines, excluding the title, and be typed in black ink on one side of A4.
- Poems must be the original work of the entrant and must not have been published, self-published or published on online or broadcast. Poems are judged anonymously so the poet’s name address etc., MUST NOT appear on the poem.
- Poems must be written in English.
- No corrections can be made to poems entered, nor can fees be refunded.
- Entries cannot be returned.
- If you require confirmation that your postal entry has arrived please enclose a stamped self-addressed postcard marked ‘Acknowledgement’.
- Copyright of each poem remains with the poet, but by entering the competition you give the organisers the right to publish the winning poems both online and in printed media.
- The judge’s decision is final and neither she nor the organisers will enter into any correspondence.
- Prizewinners will be notified during April, and lists of the prizewinners and the long-listed contestants will be published on The Rialto website.
- The competition organisers reserve the right to change the judge without notice and not to award prizes if in the judge’s opinion such an action is justified.
For more official information click "Further official information" below.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
http://www.therialto.co.uk/pages/nature-poetry-competition-2017/