Many thanks to everyone who joined us for our Rialto Nature and Place Competition winners event last month. There was a great turn out with all enjoying a special reading from this year’s judge, acclaimed poet, Zaffar Kunial.

Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge. He is a recipient of Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize and his first poetry collection, Us, published by Faber & Faber in 2018 appeared on a number of shortlists including the Costa Poetry Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His second collection, England’s Green, was The Times Poetry Book of the Year and was placed 2nd in the Laurel Prize for environmental or nature poetry.

The audience were also treated to readings from each of the three prize winners Marianne MacRae, AV Bridgwood and Tim Tim Cheng who won first, second and third respectively. Their poems ‘Fox’, ‘Extinction Submission’ and ‘Deluge’ have also been published in issue 102 of The Rialto.

Zaffar also selected seven highly commended poems:

‘Twenty Minutes After Sunset’ – Jo Dixon
‘Ode to a Giant Puffball’ – Sam Phipps
‘Extracts from Finches’ – Ian Dudley
‘Fricatives of the Western Wood Peewee’ – Isi Unikowski
‘shell.smile.tribes’ – Kirsten Luckins
‘The Woman in the Snow’ – Lucy Watt
‘Ode to a Cornish Hedge’ – Pascale Petit

The Rialto Nature and Place Competition has been running for many years now and is an inspiring example of how the CCI Arts, Science and Conservation Programme engages with the arts to connect a wide audience with the nature.

Read more about the CCI Arts, Science and Conservation Programme here.