The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry
The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry is a major international award for poems embracing ecological themes.
The Prize aims to highlight the role poetry can play in raising awareness, gaining insight, and provoking concern for the ecological imperatives of our time.
First prize is £5,000, second prize is £2,000, and third prize is £1,000.
The judges are the iconic Mexican writer, activist and ambassador Homero Aridjis and the T S Eliot Prize-winning poet Jen Hadfield.
For the first time this year, we are launching a separate prize focused on a theme or challenge encountered by environmental campaigners in their everyday work. This year's theme is Environmental Defenders, with a £500 prize for the poem that best engages with the many threats faced by activists and communities, as they protect their families, livelihoods and planet from schemes that cause devastating environmental damage. This prize is in association with Global Witness, who have catalogued the closing of political space for civil society action in their Environmental Activists campaign
The winner of the Ginkgo Prize and the winner of the Environmental Defenders Prize will be awarded week-long residencies at the Cambridge Writing Retreat.
The winners' ceremony will be held on the evening of 22 November 2019 at Swedenborg House, Bloomsbury, London.
The Ginkgo Prize is kindly sponsored by Loowatt and funded by the Edward Goldsmith Foundation. The prize is organised by the Poetry School.
