"Nature, the Environment & Sustainability" Short Story Competition 2023

 

Photo: cocoparisienne @ Pixabay

Are you moved by our connections with the natural world? Are you interested in nature writing, climate fiction, the ecological crisis, the Anthropocene, nature and well-being? 

The University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing and Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability are jointly sponsoring a short fiction / creative non-fiction competition for East Midlands resident writers on the theme of "Nature, Environment, Sustainability." 

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.

The Centre for New Writing is an interdisciplinary research centre exploring and developing new directions in contemporary writing. You can see more information about our work here. 

The Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability  conducts research on the impact of the environment on human health. It was established in 2018 with the vision to improve human health and the health of the environment through cutting edge multidisciplinary research, in a changing world. You can read more about it here. 

Literary Leicester is Leicester’s free annual litfest, since 2008. Read more here. 

Meet the Judge

We’re delighted that our competition judge is 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. To read more about Mark, see here. 

To Submit Your Entry

Email literarycomp@leicester.ac.uk and include your full name, contact email and phone number IN THE BODY OF THE EMAIL. 

The document itself should be anonymised. It should ONLY contain the title and text, and NOT show the author’s name anywhere. See below for details about how to format your document.

FINAL SUBMISSION DATE IS 11.59pm (23.59) on 15th November 2023.

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING RULES CAREFULLY BEFORE SUBMITTING YOUR ENTRY. 

• Entrants must be resident in the East Midlands region, as determined by the Office for National Statistics at the time of the final submission date. See here for details.  Shortlistees’ residency will be confirmed prior to formal announcement. 

• Stories must be between 1500 and 2500 words. Any submissions over or under the word length will be disregarded. They should be submitted as a Word doc or PDF, double-spaced, 12 font in Times New Roman or Arial (unless you have a strong stylistic reason to play with the visual form of the piece on the page).  

• The final submission date is 23.59 on 15th November 2023. Late entries will not be considered in any circumstances.

• Short fiction may be in any genre. Creative non-fiction can be memoir, biography, personal essays, feature journalism, travel writing. They should be written for a lay audience, rather than specialist. 

• All work must be in English. 

• Shortlistees’ and finalists’ names will be published on the Centre for New Writing blogsite and other social media.

• All entries must meaningfully relate to the competition theme of "nature, environment, sustainability." The judge’s decision on relevance is final and cannot be questioned. 

• All entries must be submitted by email to literarycomp@leicester.ac.uk  and include your full name, contact email and phone number IN THE BODY OF THE EMAIL. The document itself should be anonymous: it only contain the title and text, and NOT show the author’s name anywhere. No other method of submission will be accepted.

• Entries should not have been previously published (including self-published, published on a website or broadcast in any way).

• Entries must be entirely original work, written solely by the submitter.

• No competitor may win more than one prize.

• Work must not be produced or edited by Chat GPT or any other AI creation tool.

• Copyright remains with the author but prize winners must give permission to have the work on the Creative Writing at Leicester website for a period of up to twelve months. The winner’s work will also be published in The Leicester Literary Review, subject to the magazine’s copyright provisions.

• Current members of the Centre for New Writing or the Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability are not allowed to enter the competition.

• Decisions of the judge(s) are final and no correspondence will be entered into regarding the decision.

• Entries that do not comply with the rules will be disqualified.

Susan Richardson, "Where the Seals Sing"

 

Susan Richardson is a writer, performer and educator whose debut work of creative non-fiction, Where the Seals Sing, has just been published by William Collins. She has also written four collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Words the Turtle Taught Me, emerged from her residency with the Marine Conservation Society and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. In addition to her ongoing writing residency with the British Animal Studies Network, facilitated by the University of Strathclyde, she has shared her work on BBC Two and Radio 3, enjoyed a four-year stint as one of the resident poets on Radio 4’s Saturday Live and performed at festivals both nationally and internationally.

About Where the Seals Sing

Blending natural history and travel, science and shamanism, memoir and myth, Where the Seals Sing offers a deep dive into the life of the grey seal, a species by which Susan Richardson has been fascinated since childhood. On foot and by boat, she journeys round Britain's coast, discovering locations both inspiring and surprising, from barely-accessible crags and crevices to an industrial riverscape of petro-chemical and nuclear power plants. She visits the howling heart of a breeding colony, delves beneath the skin of shapeshifting selkie tales and engages, too, with the many dangers that seals face, from marine debris to toxic pollution.

As she gains greater insights into the impact of these threats, Richardson explores how we may more sensitively co-exist with another species in our increasingly denatured land. What will be the next chapter in our attitude towards these animals whose bone remains have been found in Bronze Age kitchen middens and who have swum for so many centuries through our cultural and spiritual lives?

You can see more information about Where the Seals Sing on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Where the Seals Sing, by Susan Richardson

Chivvied along by a stonechat, wing-flicking and flitting from fence post to gorse, I sidestep down a steep incline and start to curve north. Soon the final beach will come into view, the most sheltered of the three, nestled in the lee of an outcrop, free from the force of prevailing wind and waves. First, though, my gaze, as if trapped as the incidental catch of a gillnet, is dragged back towards the sea. I count two, three, four marker buoys … and is that a fifth? No – it resolves, through binoculars, into a mottled head that slopes to a nose fringed by a quiver of whiskers. An Atlantic grey seal, an adult cow, her large, dark eyes fixed landwards.

The cries are closer here but a beach boulder greened with algae is still concealing their source. Fortunately, I’m able to veer off the coast path, thrash through brambles and hoick myself onto a ledge, over the edge of which I can hang, stomach down on rock and patchy grass, to check out the beach from an unobstructed angle.

And there it is.

White fur stained with blood and yellow fluids. Its whole body jerking with the effort of each cry.

A recently born seal pup.

Its mother, resting a few metres away, is ignoring it, her pebble-and-kelp surrounds also smeared with blood. Another few metres further on, a mob of great black-backed gulls attacks the afterbirth, pulling it out of its steak-like shape into a stringier form, gorging torn-off scarlet strands, then tug-of-warring with the remains.

The pup appears to make an attempt to move towards its mother but manages only to flop onto its side, exposing a pink inch of umbilical cord worming from its belly fur. Mother–pup bonding seems to have been neither instant nor straightforward – the cow is more focused on the gulls than her pup and whenever a yank on the afterbirth brings one of them too close, she lunges, neck stretched, teeth bared, snarling.