Laurel Prize workshop: Reading the Finalists

Name: Laurel Prize workshop: Reading the Finalists – 20th of September
Start: 2025-09-20T10:00:00+00:00
Location: Bradford City Library

You explore the diverse ways the finalists wrote about nature, the more-than-human and the climate crisis.

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Kathleen Jamie, renowned poet, essayist, and 2025 Chair of the Laurel Prize Judges, took you through each collection from the year's Laurel Prize finalists in a session of reading and discussion.

This inspiring session offered a rare insight into the Laurel Prize’s 2025 finalists and explored what these collections say about the contemporary landscape of ecopoetry.

Kathleen Jamie is a poet and essayist. Her work concerns nature, travel and culture. Her poetry collections include The Overhaul, which won the 2012 Costa Poetry Prize, and The Tree House, which won the Forward prize.

Her non-fiction essays are collected in the three highly regarded books Findings, Sightlines, and Surfacing, all regarded as important contributions to the ‘new nature writing’. The Bonniest Companie appeared in 2015, and won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. In 2024 she published Cairn, ‘a view from the strange here-and-now’, and The KeelieHawk, a collection of poems in Scots. Kathleen’s interests are in archaeology, nature and environment, travel and art. From 2021-24 Kathleen served as Scotland’s ‘Makar’, or National Poet.

Credits

BBC Contains Strong Language was a partnership between the BBC, Word Up North and Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture. It was supported by Arts Council England.