We are looking for compelling writing that fires the imagination, and allows room for hope. But this is an open brief and we’re interested in anything relevant you might produce. It can be fiction in any genre, or creative non-fiction in the form of personal essay, memoir, feature journalism, travel or a hybrid of forms.

We love writers like Richard Powers, Arundhati Roy, Annie Dillard, Amitav Ghosh, Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Kolbert, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mark Cocker, Tim Winton and Barbara Kingsolver; TV shows like Wild Isles and Nature Watch, Big Garden Birdwatch and the Big Butterfly Count.

At whatever point you are in thinking and writing about nature, the environment, and sustainability, tell us about it in fiction or creative non-fiction of 1500-2500 words.

The competition is free to enter. There are prizes of £600 for the winner and £100 for four other finalists, drawn from a shortlist of ten. The ten shortlistees will have the opportunity to participate in an all-expenses-paid nature writing workshop with the competition judge in February 2024. The five finalists’ works will be published on The Centre for New Writing’s Creative Writing at Leicester blogsite. The winning piece will also be print-published in The Leicester Literary Review. The winning and finalist authors will be invited to read from their work at a special event as part of the Literary Leicester 2024 festival in March alongside the competition judge.

Judge: Multi-award-winning author, naturalist and The Guardian’s "Country Diary" writer Mark Cocker. Mark has published a dozen books on a wide range of subjects and contributed to two dozen more.

The competition is only for writers resident in the East Midlands.

Find out more here

Deadline: 15 November 2023, midnight