An Award for

Nature Writing

Welcome to the Nature Chronicles Prize, a  biennial, international, English-language literary award. Our aim is to find engaging, unique, essay-length non-fiction that responds to the time we are in and the world as it is, challenging established notions of nature writing where necessary.

The winner will receive £10,000 and five runners up £1,000 each. All six winning entries will be published in an anthology.

About Us

The prize was conceived to mark the global pandemic and serve those who witnessed it. It is also a memorial to Prudence Scott, a lifelong nature diarist who died in 2019. Her Trust is the prize’s sponsor.

The 2022 Winner

Congratulations to Nicola Pitchford.

“Her essay is a richly layered reading experience……Not only did ‘A Parable of Arable Land’ make us think deeply, but we had the sense that Prudence Scott might also have chosen it”
Kathryn Aalto

 

Key Dates

1st September 2023 – Open for entries

15th January 2024 – Entries close

1st August 2024 – Longlist announced

1st September 2024 – Shortlist announced

November 2024 – Prizegiving and book launch at Kendal Mountain Book Festival

 

Our Sponsor | Prudence Scott (1926–2019)

Prudence Mary Milligan was born in 1926 to a naval family. She was given a Quaker education and then trained as a nurse. In 1952 she married and in 1961 moved to the Lake District where she brought up her four children, mostly as a single parent. It was a quiet, contained sort of existence, which immersed her children in nature: hedgehogs, Fell ponies, curlews. She was a great reader, and sometimes painted and sometimes wrote poetry – but always she kept up with her journals. In them, she observes her children and her surroundings with the same restless, curious, unsentimental eye.

She died in London on 1 September 2019, aged 93.

I count the days happiest when I have ridden a horse, baked a cake, bathed the children, written for an hour or two, and read before sleeping.

                                                                                                                    7 July 1964

 

The Judges 2021/22

Kathryn Aalto

Kathryn Aalto

Kathryn Aalto is an American historian, designer, speaker and author living in Exeter. She has written three books including Nature and Human Intervention (2011), the New York Times bestseller The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood (2015), and Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World (2020). She is a regular contributor to publications including Outside, Sierra and Smithsonian Magazine, and is co-founder of the Rural Writing Institute.

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is an author and academic whose creative and critical work has a largely environmental focus. Her publications include the Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year Swims (2017), the forthcoming collection Of Sea (2021), and the monograph A Social Biography of Contemporary Innovative Poetry Communities: The Gift, the Wager and Poethics (2017). Her nature writing memoir The Grassling: A Geological Memoir (2019) was a winner of the Penguin Random House WriteNow award. She is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Northumbria University.

Matthew Cobb

Matthew Cobb

Matthew Cobb is a professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, where his research focuses on the sense of smell, insect behaviour and the history of science. He is also a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, and has translated five books on popular science and science history from French into English. His acclaimed book The Idea of the Brain was shortlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

Sara Hunt

Sara Hunt

Sara Hunt worked in publishing in London and New York before founding award-winning independent publisher Saraband in 1994, specialising in narrative non-fiction – particularly in place and life writing – and literary fiction. Originally from Lancashire, she has a lifelong connection with the Lake District. Saraband has published Wainwright Prize-listed nature titles, as well as award-nominated and winning books in the Booker, Rathbones Folio, Saltire Society, Lakeland, Highland and Portico prizes. Saraband provides a platform for underrepresented voices from all parts of the UK and internationally.

Dr Will Smith

Dr Will Smith

Will Smith is a bookseller at Grasmere’s Sam Read’s and an academic whose book reviews feature monthly in Cumbria Life and on BBC Radio Cumbria. He is a lecturer in Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling and holds a doctorate in Canadian Literature from the University of Nottingham. In 2019 he co-edited a poetry anthology, Companions of Nature, and Lakeland Book Award-winning Grasmere: A History in 55½ Buildings. He was a judge of the 2019 Costa Book Awards.

News / Events / Updates

Meet the Winners

Meet the Winners

JENNY CHAMARETTE - Q is for Garden Jenny Chamarette is a writer, mentor, researcher and curator/artist living in South East London, where she works out of the studio at the foot of her garden. She...

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Meet the Winners

Meet the Winners

NEHA SINHA - City of Covid-Trees Neha Sinha is an award-winning conservation biologist. Neha heads Conservation and Policy at Bombay Natural History Society, BirdLife in India. She was chosen for...

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Meet the Winners

Meet the Winners

JOANNA POCOCK - None of This Should Be Here Joanna Pocock is a writer currently living in London. It has since been published in the UK, US and Canada, and has been translated into French and...

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The Anthology

Contained within this, the first Nature Chronicles Prize Anthology, are the outstanding winning entries for the inaugural prize, by Jenny Chamarette, Laura Coleman, Ben Crane, Joanna Pocock and Neha Sinha, alongside the inaugural overall winner – Nicola Pitchford, for her essay ‘A Parable of Arable Land’. These winning works express diverse responses to our planet and its life, and together embody the best of contemporary nature writing, whether by emerging or established authors.

The anthology is introduced by bestselling nature writer Kathryn Aalto, who was one of the judges for this prize.

Available from bookstores or online from the publisher Saraband.

Let us keep you posted

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